"Do Not Judge Anyone"

A monastic approach to everyday living that applies Jesus’s teaching of radical non-judgement as a balm for the polarized environment commonly found in the Church and the world today.     Too often Christianity has been hijacked by the superego and the good news of grace has been compromised by fear and the rationalization of violence. In “Do Not Judge Anyone” Cistercian monk Isaac Slater reflects on the desert fathers’ teachings and practice of not judging with a focus on contemporary life. Interweaving sources from East and West, ancient and modern, Slater finds profound points of contact between the first monks and figures like Dostoevsky and Simone Weil, and in the teaching and witness of Pope Francis. “Do Not Judge Anyone” offers a radical, refreshing, and deeply hopeful vision of the gospel for the twenty-first century.    Following closely Jesus’s injunction to “Stop judging!” the first Christian monks strongly emphasized the practice of not judging others as central to the gospel ethos. Through captivating and sometimes enigmatic sayings and stories of the desert fathers, Slater shares a monastic approach to everyday living that applies Jesus’s teaching of radical non-judgement as a balm for the polarized environment commonly found in the Church and the world today.

Isaac Slater, OCSO, is a monk of the Abbey of the Genesee in New York, where he currently serves as novice director and infirmarian. He is the author of Beyond Measure: The Poetics of the Image in Bernard of Clairvaux (Cistercian Publications) and This and That: Selected Short Poems of Ryokan (2026 Monkfish Publishing). He has published two collections of poems, Surpassing Pleasure (Porcupine's Quill), Lean (Grey Borders), along with a co-translation, The Tangled Braid: Ninety-Nine Poems by Hafiz of Shiraz (Fons Vitae).