About The Stromata

The Stromata is a freely accessible library of out-of-print Christian texts — homilies, letters, meditations, treatises — organised by author, tradition, era, and theme. Everything here is written by someone who has been dead for more than a century, which means it is free to read, free to share, and free to stay that way.

The writers gathered here — from Justin Martyr in the second century to the Reformers, from Augustine to the Anglican divines — are often described as “the Fathers” or “the tradition” in ways that make them feel remote. They were not. They were working pastors and careful theologians, monks who wrote about prayer and repentance from lives given entirely to both, bishops who shepherded communities through plague, invasion, and the collapse of empires. Their writing is direct, often surprising, and more contemporary in feeling than the centuries between us would suggest. The Stromata exists to make their work easier to find and more pleasurable to read.

You don’t need a seminary degree to read these texts, and The Stromata doesn’t assume you have one. The site is organised to help readers who know they’re interested but aren’t sure where to start — by theme (prayer, repentance, the Trinity), by tradition (patristic, Anglican, Reformed, Orthodox), or simply by browsing. The goal is a site that is catechetical by design: one that helps you understand who these writers were and why they might matter, not just where to find their words.

The library is deliberately selective. Every author died before 1900 — this gives a clean safe harbour for copyright and keeps the scope manageable. The selection skews Anglican and patristic, reflecting the editor’s own reading life, though the intent is pan-Christian. Texts are entered one by one, editorially reviewed, and marked with their source and provenance. Where a scan was used for digitisation, the quality is noted on the text itself.

This is a small library, and it is growing slowly. That is by design.

The Stromata was founded by Keith Mason. I started reading patristic texts as a teenager — not because anyone asked me to, but because I found them strange and alive in a way that surprised me. Years went by. I moved into technology, working mainly in and around startups, and the two parts of my life sat apart from each other. I kept noticing that a lot of this material was technically available online but practically inaccessible: scattered, poorly presented, on sites that felt long-abandoned. I thought I could do something about that — not just typographically, but editorially. A site that helped readers who were new to these writers find their way in.

I ran an earlier version on WordPress. When I became a parent — I now have four children, the youngest a newborn — the maintenance overhead became impossible and the site quietly went offline. The technology has changed enough that I’ve been able to rebuild it in a way that sits alongside a full life rather than competing with it. That’s what this is.

The Stromata is free to read and always will be. It has no advertising, no subscription, and no institutional funding. If you find it useful and would like to support its continuation, even a small contribution helps with hosting and keeps the editorial work going.

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