“Truly seeking God” is the one requirement Saint Benedict establishes for the admission of a candidate to the monastery. Once inside, that is exactly what he or she will be doing. In the first part of the book, “From the Rising of the Sun to its Setting,” Bernard Bonowitz recounts the ways in which the monk actively seeks God in all the practices and places of the monastic life—in silence and liturgical prayer, work and leisure, solitude and community, spiritual direction and fraternal friendship, the encounter with nature and the encounter with the unsuspected recesses of his or...