This work highlights the importance of gifts to the poor for Christians in the later Roman Empire. It asks what it meant to give to the poor, the virtues it dis

Richard Finn OP examines the significance of almsgiving in Churches of the later empire for the identity and status of the bishops, ascetics, and lay people who

This book seeks to add to common representations in the scholarship on almsgiving in late antiquity concerning the remission of post-baptismal sin, efforts to r

A preeminent classical scholar on the emergence of one of our most familiar social divisions.

Pagan asceticism: cultic and contemplative purity -- Asceticism in Hellenistic and Rabbinic Judaism -- Christian asceticism before Origen -- Origen and his asce