Rachel WHEELER.  Desert Daughters, Desert Sons: Rethinking the Christian Desert Tradition. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2020.  Pp. ix + 178.  $19.95 pb.  ISBN 9780814685006.  Reviewed by Mary DOAK, University of San Diego, San Diego,  CA 92116.

 Rachel Wheeler provides a compelling introduction to the desert spirituality of early Christianity.   Her love of this ancient wisdom is evident throughout this engaging book, even as she draws attention to the gaps in the stories and especially to the marginalized and often missing voices and experiences of women.  Wheeler thus masterfully exemplifies the hermeneutics of interrogating texts while also being interrogated by them.  The result is neither a nostalgic traditionalism that seeks to escape into the past nor an unrelenting criticism that rejects all but the “woke” insights of the present moment. Instead of either of these too easy options, Wheeler envisions a more adequate spirituality that is informed by but does not merely repeat past options.    

Wheeler approaches her task in 5 clearly written chapters, each of which proceeds through astute analyses of stories from the tradition of desert spirituality in the early Church.  Wheeler highlights the timeless values and the profound insights achieved in this ascetic effort to live for God about all else, but she also identifies its problematic assumptions about the centrality of males and about the superiority of spiritual families that supplant biological families and exclude women.  As Wheeler shows, the stories often undermine these assumptions in spite of themselves.  Women continue to be present even where they are presumed to be absent, and Wheeler invites the reader to consider how these often sidelined but nonetheless self-directed women might have told the stories differently. 

As her title “Desert Daughters, Desert Sons” suggests, Wheeler’s engagement with early Christian asceticism intends to do more than celebrate the often overlooked presence and even success of women in this movement.  She further invites us to consider the biological family relationships and responsibilities of those who went out to the desert to escape these bonds.  As Wheeler reminds us, every desert fathers was also a son, and each desert mother was also a daughter.  Indeed, the stories often reveal these eclipsed relationships, narrating the persistent grief of abandoned mothers in order to praise the sons who reject their ties to biological family—and thus, as Wheeler points out, leave the mothers and sisters without the assistance the sons would normally have provided.  Wheeler dares to imagine that Christianity might yet develop a less dualistic and more adequate spirituality, one that achieves the total self-giving love these desert ascetics aimed for, but without divorcing the biological from the spiritual or rejecting the gendered other.   She points toward a spirituality informed by desert asceticism, but embracing rather than fleeing from commitment to the whole range of people and relationships that make us who we are.

Given Wheeler’s profound insights into and appreciation for this spiritual tradition, this book would serve as an excellent introduction to desert spirituality for students, parishes, or anyone seeking a better, more balanced way of life.  Wheeler makes it clear that Christians today have much to learn from these ancient ascetics.  At the same time, this book is a superb example of a mutually critical interaction that allows a religious tradition to challenge the reader who is challenging it.  I recommend the use of this book not only for the study of spirituality or the early church, but also to teach undergraduate students the indispensable skills of reading critically, recognizing a text’s gaps and silences, and identifying not only the obvious point but also the hidden assumption.  It is hard to imagine a better example of the gift and challenge of religious studies today.