Jonathan Alter tells the epic story of an enigmatic man of faith and his improbable journey from barefoot boy to global icon. Alter paints an intimate and surprising portrait of the only president since Thomas Jefferson who can fairly be called a Renaissance Man, a complex figure—ridiculed and later revered—with a piercing intelligence, prickly intensity, […]

On November 17, 2021, in 213-0 vote, the U.S. Catholic bishops assigned September 5 as the feast date to St. Teresa of Kolkata, the founder of the Missionaries of Charity. Since 1972, the Missionaries of Charity have served in the United States, and Mother Teresa has long been revered in a significant number of U.S. […]

Everyone knows the name Amelia Earhart. But the other four women in O’Brien’s story were, in some cases, better pilots and their stories are no less compelling. O’Brien recounts for us the amazing exploits of Ruth Elder, the first American woman try to fly across the Atlantic Ocean after Lindbergh’s feat in 1927; Ruth Nichols, […]

Mark Twain had a school-boy declare: ‘Homer was not written by Homer, but by another man of that name’ – which suggests that the myth of the author endures, despite scholarly attempts to debunk it. The earliest sources that mention Homer by name date to the sixth century BCE: from them we can establish that […]