anchorites

An exception is anchorites, who generally spend all their time in prayer and do rely on donations, but they generally don't move around from place to place.

Instead of communal attendance, adherents live largely as anchorites and communicate their discontent to their peers by digital epistle.

For what it's worth, anchorites would wall themselves into a small room -- the folks who lived atop a pillar were called stylites.

This shows up multiple times, with Mortification of the flesh, anchorites, ect.

To ignore it in favor of only one strand of Buddhism is like seeing Christianity only through the eyes of Flagellants or Dominican monks or anchorites.

I remember my dad getting a visit from US anchorites after they found he had contact with Jim Jones via ham radio.

In medieval Christianity there were stylites dwelling up their pillars and (some thousand years later) anchorites sealed in their cells, and all this stuff about life-denying rings true except that Catholics, in the modern era at least, are mostly pro-life and anti-contraception and breed like rabbits.

How can this entire thing be written - including the observation that most entrances are “in or near” Christian churches - without even mentioning the extraordinarily obvious conclusion of forced or voluntary anchorites?

Tom Cahill, in his book "Mysteries of the Middle Ages" [1] explains explains how in ancient times, people had very different attitudes towards hermits, stylites, and anchorites: "Though often represented as a period of repression...

Anchorites would often live underground in cells.