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Title: Wisdom for the Journey: Conversations with Spiritual Fathers of the Christian East 

Author: Serge Bolshakoff 
Epilogue: M. Basil Pennington, ocso 
ISBN: 0-8189-0836-X 
Paperback: xvi + 208 pp. 
Price: $14.95 + shipping 

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This book is largely made up of conversations that Dr. Serge Bolshakoff had with monastic Fathers of the Russian Orthodox Church. These took place over a period of 50 years in Russia, Estonia, Finland, on Mount Athos, and in France. These accounts have a vivid quality which draws us alongside the author into the presence of these great teachers of life and religion as they converse with him. These encounters are between a man of devout Orthodox faith with an unusual skill for interviewing and then recording what was said and men advanced in the life of prayer, some of whom were true mystics. There is a poetry in these writings that breaks through in the descriptions of landscapes and monasteries. Thus transformed these symbolize the deeper meaning of the text. In his travels, this searching man of God found much about the Christian life which he shares enthusiastically with us.
 
Serge (Sergius) Bolshakoff was born in St. Petersburg in 1901, and studied civil engineering. In 1919, after the Russian Revolution, he moved to Estonia where he studied economics, sociology, and theology. He traveled widely in Europe in the cause of ecumenism and of social justice based on Christian ethics. In 1943, he received a doctorate in philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford. He wrote many books, most notably Russian Mystics, a copy of which he personally presented to Pope John XXIII. After his fiancée died in a car accident in 1951, he went from monastery to monastery for a few weeks or months at a time writing, praying, and interviewing the spiritual masters whose thoughts illuminate this book. He stayed at Hauterive Abbey in Switzerland from 1974 until his death in 1990. 

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