Christianity
The Christian retreat can be defined in the most simplest of terms as a definite time (from a few hours in length to a month) spent away from one's normal life for the purpose of reconnecting, usually in prayer, with God. Although the practice of leaving one's everyday life to connect on a deeper level with God, be that in the desert (as with the Desert Fathers), or in a monastery, is as old as Christianity itself, the practice of spending a specific time away with God is a more modern phenomenon, dating from the 1520s and St. Ignatius of Loyola's composition of the Spiritual Exercises. Jesus fasting in the desert for forty days is used as a biblical justification of retreats.
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Famous quotes containing the word christianity:
“The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“Wherever there are walls I shall inscribe this eternal accusation against Christianity upon them—I can write in letters which make even the blind see ... I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty—I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind....”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)