If you think about prisons and monasteries, it is tempting to say the main difference, after the amenities, is the condition of choice. But you wonder if "corrections" couldn't learn from, shall we say, rejections, as in rejecting the world.

What if Benedictine abbots were allowed to use their knowledge and principles to design, say, a medium security prison. Would that create a radically different outcome from the time spent "in debt to society" as opposed to "in service to god?"

The sufi's claim that it is better to be in the world, but not of it, than to renounce it altogether. In Islamic tradition, it is not that unusual for a man in his fifties to leave his family, estate, etc and take the vows of a religious order or some form of spiritual seeker. What are you renouncing after you have had a family, a career, a stint in war or the rat race? Do the Christian orders encourage the taking of vows after the age of fifty?

What I don't get from this series of articles is a sense of the happiness quotient at large in the monastery. Some examples of incessantly smiling older men. Some numb to a greeting. What was the real mood in this world?

Bernard of Clairveaux wrote the orders for the Knights Templar and the Cistercian order both. Can't imagine a greater difference in outcome of two orders than those, in some ways. But how did Bernard's sense of order cohere them in similar ways, and what could be applied from that insight to some of the issues of our day?

When I was researching the Spanish Civil War, I ended up on a long digression through the anti-Church social uprisings that started in Spain in the late 19th Century and continued to some degree or another until Franco took control. The extreme hatred that was expressed toward the nuns and priests, and of course the monastic orders, was somewhat rooted in the denial of sensuality, but it was more deeply rooted in the hatred of hypocrisy that was seen in the riches of the Churches' possessions and the servility it expressed toward the aristocracy.

It seems that the faultline between the sacred and the profane is drawn more clearly between honesty and its failure, than sensuality and its denial.