Biographies

Though today a devout Catholic priest, when he was a teenager, becoming a priest was the very last thing anyone ever would have expected of Donald Calloway. In his teens he was a heavy drug and alcohol abuser, a high school dropout who had been kicked...

"The world is too small," Saint Frances Cabrini (1850–1917) once declared. "I would like to embrace it all, to reach every corner." This compelling, authoritative biography chronicles the astounding life of a petite Italian-born religious sister...

One chilly November morning in 1927, a slender young priest stood before a firing squad in Mexico City. Five shots cracked through the air, and he fell lifeless on the ground. The man was Miguel Agustin Pro, S.J. His crime? Being a Catholic priest. As a...

Focusing on the lives and writings of five women mystics, the great theologian and spiritual writer Louis Bouyer shows that, far from relegating women to some inferior position, Christianity has often been shaped and steered by women. The Church passed...

Saint John of the Cross is the Church's premier teacher on contemplative prayer. Catholic tradition even calls him the Mystical Doctor. The sixteenth-century Carmelite priest not only wrote four massive treatises on the spiritual life, along with some of...

Rome in the year 590 a.d. A plague is tearing through the city. Pope Pelagius II is dead. Outside the walls, Lombard soldiers are raising their swords. What can save the Eternal City? All eyes, and all hopes, are on the next Pope. Veteran writer Sigrid...

Emil Kapaun—priest, soldier and Korean War hero—was a rare man. He was awarded posthumously the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award, and is also being considered by the Vatican for canonization as a saint.Just as...

In 1957, at twenty-seven years old, Father Aloysius Schwartz of Washington, D.C., asked to be sent to one of the saddest places in the world: South Korea in the wake of the Korean War. Just a few months into his priesthood, he stepped off the train in...

J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings took first place in several nationwide British polls on the "greatest book of the century". He may be the most popular writer of our age, but Tolkien is often misunderstood. This major new study of his life, his...

Very few people know that Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) wrote a major work on Joan of Arc. Still fewer know that he considered it not only his most important but also his best work. He spent twelve years in research and many months in France doing archival...

This work is a popular but thorough biography of St. Junipero Serra (1713- 1784), the tireless Franciscan missionary who came to California in the eighteenth century to evangelize the Native Americans. Well known for the historic missions that he helped...

G. K. Chesterton was one of the most well-known and beloved writers of his time. Yet he has been strangely neglected today. This book is the perfect introduction to Chesterton. Ahlquist is an able guide who takes the reader through twelve of Chesterton's...