St. Margaret was raised in a poor family in Tuscany. After the death of her mother, when she was eleven, her new stepmother turned her out of the house. Eventually…

The French artist Georges Rouault began his career as an apprentice in a studio for stained-glass restoration, an experience that influenced his painting style—easily recognized by the use of color…

At the age of nine, Bakhita was kidnapped from her village in southern Sudan and sold into slavery. For years, she was sold from one set of masters to another,…

Born in Alabama, Coretta Scott studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she met her future husband, Martin Luther King Jr., a graduate student at Boston…

By the age of forty, William Wilson, a Wall Street analyst and hopeless alcoholic, felt he had reached a dead end. In 1935, after repeated hospitalizations, and having tried other…

This saint’s mother was the unmarried daughter of a Scottish king. When she was found to be pregnant, her father set her adrift in a small boat on the River…

St. Gertrude, a Dutch peasant girl, supported herself in domestic service. At one point she was betrothed to be married, but when her fiancé chose instead to marry another she…

The feast of the Holy Family, most often celebrated on the Sunday after Christmas, encourages us to imagine the setting in which Jesus spent his childhood years learning a trade…

In many religious traditions, the birth of a Divine King is attended by wondrous signs from heaven. The same is true of the nativity stories of Jesus. But in the…

Dorothy Sayers was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman and headmaster. She became best known as a writer of detective novels (many featuring Lord Peter Wimsey), but she also wrote…