The quest for solitude with God runs through the entire Christian tradition. Peter-Damian Belisle shows us its biblical origins, through the age of the early desert monastics and the rise of monastic orders. He surveys those orders, like the Camaldolese, Carthusians, and Cistercians who maintained the hermit ideal. He continues on to examine such twentieth-century figures as Charles de Foucauld, Dorothy Day, and the Trappist martyrs of Algeria