DAILY DEVOTION BY EMAIL

Subscribe to the email List:  This web site is automatically updated every day with the next chapter from The Imitation of Christ.  Write to me if you would like to recieve the new chapter every day by email.  The email list is maintained by a real person, Tom Truex.  Once you're on the list, my computer sends you the email every day.  The only way to get off the list, is to send me another email and ask to be removed.

Thomas à Kempis. (b. 1379 or 1380, d. 1471). The Imitation of Christ.

THE TREATISE “Of the Imitation of Christ” appears to have been originally written in Latin early in the fifteenth century. Its exact date and its authorship are still a matter of debate. Manuscripts of the Latin version survive in considerable numbers all over Western Europe, and they, with the vast list of translations and of printed editions, testify to its almost unparalleled popularity... The most probable author, however, especially when the internal evidence is considered, is Thomas Haemmerlein, known also as Thomas à Kempis, from his native town of Kempen, near the Rhine, about forty miles north of Cologne. Haemmerlein, who was born in 1379 or 1380, was a member of the order of the Brothers of Common Life, and spent the last seventy years of his life at Mount St. Agnes, a monastery of Augustinian canons in the diocese of Utrecht. Here he died on July 26, 1471, after an uneventful life spent in copying manuscripts, reading, and composing, and in the peaceful routine of monastic piety.  (source:  The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.)

Why Kempis?  Why not?  I've been reading Kempis on and off for years. Some of it seems harsh and extreme, by modern standards.  It is.  Read a little of it, and see if you agree that it pretty much on point, by God's standards.  Here's what the introduction to Benham's translation says:  "With the exception of the Bible, no Christian writing has had so wide a vogue or so sustained a popularity as this. And yet, in one sense, it is hardly an original work at all. Its structure it owes largely to the writings of the medieval mystics, and its ideas and phrases are a mosaic from the Bible and the Fathers of the early Church. But these elements are interwoven with such delicate skill and a religious feeling at once so ardent and so sound that it promises to remain, what it has been for five hundred years, the supreme call and guide to spiritual aspiration."

How Kempis?  I was reading Kempis the old fashioned way.  I thought it might be more convenient to read it online.  So I wrote a BASIC program to upload a chapter, daily, from the book to my web site.  Sometimes I missed a chapter.  So after a few months, I modified the program to send a email with the next chapter, every day.  It's easy to add anyone to the email list.