Paradise Besieged:a Journey to Medieval

Richard John Friedlander, mediator, church ecclesiarch, and Greek Orthodox Christian agnostic Jew, takes you on a decidedly unorthodox journey to the Holy Mountain of Athos in Greece - a wondrous and wild land where the only residents are monks and no one used the word "change" for over a thousand years. Born in Brooklyn, a graduate of Yale and Yale Law School, Friedlander became a Greek Orthodox Christian at the Christ-like age of thirty-three and lived for the better part of the next ten years in this outpost of the Middle Ages like a Yankee in the Mother of God's Court, becoming intimately familiar with the beauty, rigors, and absurdities of monastic life, and learning how to survive, and even thrive, without modernity. With insight and humor, Friedlander vivifies the past, present, and future of a resilient community confronting a conqueror unlike any it has ever modern technology.