About
About The Monastic Pint
A library of what Christian writers have written, searchable by the questions people ask.
What this site is
The Monastic Pint collects quotations from Christian writers from the second century to the twentieth, on questions such as whether gambling is a sin or what baptism means, and shows them with the source of each. We organize the passages by theme and group them in date order, but the main content is the quotations themselves. The aim is to let you see the range of what the church has actually said.
The site is a service of The Workshoppers LLC. Everything on it is free. It is not pastoral counsel; it is a way into the reading.
How the quotations are chosen
For each question we gather the passages in the library that bear on it. We do not start from the answer we expect. The themes on each page come out of what the texts say, and the passages are sorted under those themes in date order, so you can watch an idea develop.
Each quotation is word for word from a public-domain English translation. Where we trim a passage, we mark the cut with an ellipsis. Every quotation names its author, work, and location in the work.
Many ancient works cannot be dated exactly. Where a date is approximate it is marked c. (circa), for example c. 400.
What the library contains
The library holds 590 works by 147 authors, cut into 398,503 passages. It includes the Ante-Nicene, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, medieval and Reformation writers, and later Protestant and Catholic authors. The table on the homepage shows the breakdown by era.
Its limits
- The library ends in the mid-twentieth century, because that is where public-domain texts run out. It says nothing about modern debates in modern terms.
- It is built from English translations that are free to use, so some writers and traditions are better represented than others. There are gaps, and we are working to fill them.
- A quotation shows what one person wrote. It does not mean the site endorses every view in it, and the views on a page often disagree.
- Quotations can have errors: a wrong citation, a typo, a misattribution. For anything important, check the cited source.
Corrections and contact
If you find a mistake or know of a work we should add, contact details are in our Privacy policy. We read every message and correct errors.