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Sacrifice in the Desert: A Study of an Egyptian Minority Through the Prism of Coptic Monasticism

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The Copts are usually just forgotten by the academic world, of if they're remembered it's for their early medieval florescence of Alexandrian theologians and desert fathers. Ecclesiastical historians hold the subject in a death grip and use their philological expertise to mute all nonspecialist's commentaries (how many of us speak Coptic, after all). Finally a social scientist, an anthropologist, no less, investigates the contemporary Coptic experience and shows that its culture is still rooted in its special monastic heritage. This book is a fabulous ethnographic account of monasticism itself as well as a penetrating synthesis of the anthropology of religion applied to a nonwestern variant of Christianity. Before an ecclesiastical historian attacks it as an intrusion into their turf I want to applaud it as a beautifully crafted and carefully considered study that supplies a great resource for a subject scarcely ever treated in this way.