Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in Hurley, New York. Her parents named her Isabella, a name she abandoned at forty-six when she took up her calling as a prophet and preacher.

Vinoba Bhave was widely regarded as the spiritual heir of Mahatma Gandhi. Born to a devout Brahmin family in Bombay, he had wavered in his youth between pursuing the life of a spiritual seeker or joining the resistance to British colonial rule

Though as a child she wished for nothing more than to become a Carmelite nun, Elizabeth Catez acceded to her mother’s condition—that she await her twenty-first birthday.

In November 1938 the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany offered the world a brazen display of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Many Church officials turned a blind eye, but not Bernard Lichtenberg, provost of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral.

Clarence Jordan believed the most vital need for reconciliation in the South was between blacks and whites. At that time, such talk was considered dangerously radical.

On September 21, 1990, Rosario Livatino, the magistrate for the court of Agrigento in Sicily, was driving to his office unescorted when a car drove him off the road.

Caryll Houselander, an English laywoman, had a definite sense of her vocation: to awaken others to the presence of Christ in the world.

In his life and in his relationship with the world, Francis represented the breakthrough of a new model of human and cosmic community.

Monika Hellwig taught at Georgetown University for thirty years, becoming one of the most influential theologians in America.

She was determined at all times to balance the life of action and contemplation— the paths of both Martha and Mary.