Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Stoic and the Cross: A History of Christian Stoicism

The Stoic and the Cross: A History of Christian Stoicism

Woodworth, Mg 'Doc'

Paperback

Philosophy

ISBN13: 9798176637021
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 23 2026
Pages: 284
Weight: 0.84
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Why does a pagan emperor who died in AD 180 sound so much like the Sermon on the Mount?

Marcus Aurelius is on the bestseller table. Seneca is quoted in sermons. Epictetus is recommended by therapists and football coaches. The ancient Stoics have come back, and a great many of the people reading them are Christians, or used to be, or are wondering whether they should be. Some have found in the Stoics a discipline their churches never taught them. Some are troubled by how familiar it all sounds. And pastors are saying what pastors have always said when the Stoics come back into fashion: this is a fine philosophy and not the faith, and the two must not be confused.

They are right. They are also two thousand years late.

The Stoic and the Cross tells the story of the longest conversation in Western thought: the two-thousand-year argument between the philosophy of the Painted Porch and the faith of the cross. It begins with a shipwrecked merchant's son in Athens around 300 BC and ends with a seminary professor writing on a website in 2026, and it follows real people all the way: a water carrier who wrote a hymn, a millionaire who taught poverty, a slave who became the most influential teacher in the Roman Empire, an emperor writing to himself in a tent on the Danube, a Jewish tentmaker preaching to philosophers in Athens, bishops and desert monks and medieval schoolmen, a young Frenchman named Calvin whose first book was about a Roman philosopher, a Dutch scholar in a country at war, a Victorian critic, a Navy pilot in a North Vietnamese prison, and a French priest who taught the modern world how to read the emperor's notebook.

Written in the tradition of narrative history, with no footnotes and no Greek required, this is the story of what the church took from the Stoics, what it changed, and what it refused. Christians borrowed the Stoic discipline for the soul: the examined day, the anticipated loss, the watch over the mind. They refused the Stoic claim that the soul is enough on its own. The Stoics said a wise man does not weep. The church said Christ wept.

For the Christian who has picked up Marcus Aurelius and wondered whether it was safe, and for the reader of the modern Stoic books who wants to know where the practice came from, this is the history neither has been told.

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