"I was going to teach the course on early monasticism to students from Evangelical Christian colleges. We met for the first class in a room spare but replete with beautiful Coptic icons. The texts we were studying was The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, the translation of the alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum by Benedicta Ward. I opened the first meeting with a question: “When you hear the word monk or monks, what first comes to mind?” One young woman responded, “They’re agents of Satan.” This, I thought, was going to be a tough audience."