The modern tendency to enshrine the human intellect—to the exclusion of the spiritual—was well underway in mid-nineteenth century Europe. More »

Ever since the third century, when efforts were made to meld the four Gospels into one, the church has insisted on maintaining the separate integrity of each account of the good news. More »

What can an indolent, self-absorbed teenager have to do with God’s plan for evangelizing a nation? Sixteen years old and from a well-to-do family, this kid has never applied himself to his studies, let alone taken his Christian faith seriously. More »

St. John of God is one of Spain’s leading religious figures. He was born in Montemoro Novo, Portugal, on March 8, 1495, into a deeply religious family that was poor but had once been wealthy and prominent. More »

“Holy martyrs, Perpetua and Felicity, pray for us.” Many times in my life, I have heard Perpetua and Felicity mentioned in litanies of saints and prayers of the Church. More »

For the first part of his life, he was a small fish in a big pond. A member of a disadvantaged minority, he lived in the obscurity of a backwater province in the mighty Roman empire. More »

The man whom Bible readers know by both the Semitic name “Saul” and the Greco-Roman name “Paul” was born into a setting that dovetailed two dramatically different cultures: the Judaism of Jerusalem and the Greco-Roman world of Damascus. More »

Early on the morning of February 3, 1943, survivors from the torpedoed U.S. troopship Dorchester shivered in lifeboats as they watched their ship slide slowly into the nerve-deadening cold of the North Atlantic. More »