I can only hope to have a sliver of his discipline to lead my daily life.
He has a wife, two grown kids, and some grandkids too. He’s a believing, practising Lutheran [0] (some have even said a “devout” one) and published a book on the Bible [1]. He plays piano and organ - he sometimes plays the organ at his church, and he and his wife even have a pipe organ in their house [2], and he has composed an original work for it [3].
Calling him a “monk for computer science” makes him sound very one-dimensional, when he isn’t.
[0] https://www.livinglutheran.org/2018/12/im-a-lutheran-don-knu...
[1] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/316.html
> Christian monasticism is the devotional practice of Christians who live ascetic and typically cloistered lives that are dedicated to Christian worship
So, am I really confusing monasticism with asceticism, when the later is a key part of many definitions of the former?
Many people confuse monks with members of non-monastic Christian religious orders. Many of the famous Catholic religious orders - such as Dominicans, Franciscans and Jesuits - are not monks. In the traditional understanding, monks withdraw from the world to focus primarily on prayer and contemplation, and are not actively involved in activities such as preaching, education or missionary work; those religious orders whose members are actively involved in the world in those ways are not classified as “monks”, rather “religious”. Some Jesuits are even university professors in secular subjects - such as the Australian law professor Father Frank Brennan SJ (who was once awarded the accolade “Living National Treasure”) - something fundamentally incompatible with the contemplative life of a genuine monastic.
Is that true of non-Christian “monks”, such as Buddhist bhikkhus? I don’t think I understand Buddhism well enough to confidently venture an opinion. But, I do think that using a Christian-origin word to describe a concept in a radically different religious tradition is a questionable decision; using the indigenous term (bhikkhu) is preferable since it avoids that issue entirely.