Hermits around the web – Hermitary
news, sites, and pages of interest about hermits and solitude
In an article titled “What We Can Learn From Solitude,” the New YorkTimes profiles Paul and Karen Fredette, who have long run the website and ministry”Raven’s Bread,” addressed to hermits and solitaries with a religious and spiritual theme.
URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/28/style/self-care/hermits-solitude.html; https://www.ravensbreadministries.com
Daily Mail profiles 71-year old Robert Runyon of Arkansas. The byline: “Man who dropped out of medical school to move to the woods in 1974 where he raised six children tells [Daily Mail journalist] Ben Fogle he’s STILL building his home 40 years later despite falling off the roof and going blind in one eye.”
Connecticut Public Radio’s Colin McEnroe Show pursues the topic of “Solitude and Hermits” in a program featuring Buddhist writer Stephen Batchelor, Lucinda Mosher of the Hartford Seminary, and Karen Karper Fredette, author of Consider the Ravens: On Contemporary Hermit Life and co-editor with her husband Paul of Raven’s Bread.
Smithsonian magazine offers an article titled “The Inspiring Monk Who Lived in a New Mexico Cave,” about Giovanni Maria de Agostini, “a peripatetic Italian monk who was banished from Brazil, reached northern New Mexico on foot in 1863.” The monk spent the rest of his New Mexico life in a mountain that came to be known as Hermit Peak. The hermit monk still attracts members of the Societyof the Hermit, local history buffs, the article describing one family of enthusiasts who make an annual pilgrimage to the mountain and cave.
URL: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/inspiring-monk-lived-new-mexico-cave-180973501/
A clever, informed, and useful piece from Quartzy is titled “Why millennials never want to leave their apartment anymore.” Right up to date as far as the effects of work, technology, money, and post-capitalist society. A related article in the New York Times is titled “Why You Should Find Time to Be Alone With Yourself,” and Japan Today has a similar review of the topic of “living alone.”
URL: https://qz.com/quartzy/1748191/how-millennials-became-a-generation-of-homebodies/; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/smarter-living/the-benefits-of-being-alone.html; https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/living-alone-becoming-a-way-of-life-for-many-but-that%27s-not-necessarily-for-worse