With this sourcebook you will be able to create any sort of martial artist that you can imagine, as the d20 rules presented within greatly expand the horizons of the monk, allowing him to become perhaps the most versatile and diverse class available.

The Quintessential II books are the Advanced Tactics series from Mongoose Publishing. Neither replacing or requiring the use of the first Quintessential series, these books explore aspects of character classes never before examined and allow players to fully recognize the potential of their characters. Featuring character paths that allow players to develop without the need for prestige classes and what options are available at epic level and beyond, these books are truly the next stage of character development. This seventh book in the series details that most mysterious class, the monk.

The Monk's Tale is the story of a Benedictine monk of St. John's Abbey by the name of Godfrey Diekmann, editor of Orate Fratres/Worship; organizer of and participant in national and international Liturgical Weeks; outstanding teacher; popular and gifted speaker; sought-after retreat preacher; consulter to the Pontifical Preparatory Commission on the Liturgy, which prepared for the Second Vatican Council; Council peritus fro 1963-1965; a member, from its founding, of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL); and a consultor to the Consilium for th Implementation of the Constitution on the Liturgy. A man of contagious, childlike effervescence and rock-solid faith, Farther Godfrey's life intersects and illumines some of the most fascinating events of contemporary Church history. - Provided by the publisher.

A profound and practical guide to uncovering your own wise mind and kind heart. We all want to find happiness. But how do we go about it? In this easygoing and clear-sighted guide, celebrated Buddhist meditation and philosophy master Khangser Rinpoche provides us with down-to-earth advice on how to train our minds and find our own innate wisdom and kindness along the way. He helps us see the profound insight that is open to us all, and how it can awaken us to the truth of the way things are. This insight into the truth, and the practices that help you cultivate this awareness, transform suffering into wisdom and compassion—and ultimately joy. A Monk's Guide to Finding Joy brings the ancient Tibetan mind training tradition into our twenty-first century lives. Through stories, real-life examples, reflections, and meditation practices—all told with warmth and humor—Khangser Rinpoche shows us how we can transform the suffering of our life into happiness. When we train the mind from within the context of our difficult emotions we can find true joy, just as the oyster transforms sand into a pearl.

Paying homage to prayer traditions from around the world and throughout history, this celebration of prayer covers everything from Pentacoastalist revivals to the sacred pipe to the Catholic rosary.

In Jerome and the Monastic Clergy, Andrew Cain provides the first full-scale commentary on the famous Letter to Nepotian, in which Jerome articulates his radical plan for imposing a strict ascetic code of conduct on the contemporary clergy. Cain comprehensively addresses stylistic, literary, historical, text-critical and other issues of interpretive interest. Accompanying the commentary is an introduction which situates the Letter in the broader context of its author’s life and work and exposes its fundamental propagandistic dimensions. The revised critical Latin text and the new facing-page translation will make the Letter more accessible than ever before and will provide a reliable textual apparatus for future scholarship on this key writing by one of the most prolific authors in Latin antiquity.

A revelatory account of how Christian monks identified distraction as a fundamental challenge—and how their efforts to defeat it can inform ours, more than a millennium later. The digital era is beset by distraction, and it feels like things are only getting worse. At times like these, the distant past beckons as a golden age of attention. We fantasize about escaping our screens. We dream of recapturing the quiet of a world with less noise. We imagine retreating into solitude and singlemindedness, almost like latter-day monks. But although we think of early monks as master concentrators, a life of mindfulness did not, in fact, come to them easily. As historian Jamie Kreiner demonstrates in The Wandering Mind, their attempts to stretch the mind out to God—to continuously contemplate the divine order and its ethical requirements—were all-consuming, and their battles against distraction were never-ending. Delving into the experiences of early Christian monks living in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean, and throughout Europe from 300 to 900 CE, Kreiner shows that these men and women were obsessed with distraction in ways that seem remarkably modern. At the same time, she suggests that our own obsession is remarkably medieval. Ancient Greek and Roman intellectuals had sometimes complained about distraction, but it was early Christian monks who waged an all-out war against it. The stakes could not have been higher: they saw distraction as a matter of life and death. Even though the world today is vastly different from the world of the early Middle Ages, we can still learn something about our own distractedness by looking closely at monks’ strenuous efforts to concentrate. Drawing on a trove of sources that the monks left behind, Kreiner reconstructs the techniques they devised in their lifelong quest to master their minds—from regimented work schedules and elaborative metacognitive exercises to physical regimens for hygiene, sleep, sex, and diet. She captures the fleeting moments of pure attentiveness that some monks managed to grasp, and the many times when monks struggled and failed and went back to the drawing board. Blending history and psychology, The Wandering Mind is a witty, illuminating account of human fallibility and ingenuity that bridges a distant era and our own.