The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria is by John W. Kiser, published by St. Martin’s Press in 2002.
Read this before you buy it
Our old review sold this as a book about igniting your faith and leadership. It is not a leadership book, a devotional, or a self-help title. It is a work of narrative history, and it is about seven men who were kidnapped and killed.
The seven were Trappist monks at the monastery of Tibhirine in Algeria. In March 1996, during the Algerian civil war, they were taken by an armed Islamist group. Two months later they were dead. Kiser reconstructs their lives, their decision to stay when everyone told them to leave, and the political violence that closed around them.
That is the whole shape of the book, and you should know it going in. If you are looking for something encouraging to read at the end of a hard day, this is the wrong book. It is worth reading anyway, for reasons below.
Why it is worth reading
The real subject is not the killing. It is the years before it, when a small community of French monks lived as neighbors to a Muslim village: running a clinic, sharing the garden, keeping their prayers, refusing to proselytize. When the war made every foreigner a target, they stayed. Not because they wanted to be martyrs, which Kiser is careful to show they did not, but because leaving would have meant abandoning people who had nowhere to go.
Kiser draws on the monks’ own letters and journals, so you get their arguments with each other about whether to leave. Those pages are the best part of the book. This is what costly faithfulness looks like from the inside, worked out slowly by ordinary, frightened, sometimes irritable men.
If the story sounds familiar, the 2010 French film Of Gods and Men is based on these events and won the Grand Prix at Cannes.
A note on tradition
These are Catholic monks, and the book takes their monastic life seriously on its own terms: the daily offices, the vows, the Cistercian discipline. Called to Better is not Catholic, and readers from a non-denominational background will find practices here they would not adopt. Nothing in the book asks you to. Kiser is a journalist and historian rather than a theologian, and he is reporting what these men believed and did, not arguing that you should believe it.
What we removed
The previous version of this review invented reader reactions, invented a quote, and framed the book as a resource for men’s leadership development. All of that is gone. The book has no discussion questions and no application sections.
Where we land
One of the more serious books on this site. Read it if you want a true account of what it costs to stay, and if you can handle a story that ends the way this one does.
The Monks of Tibhirine by John W. Kiser on Amazon