BIOGRAPHIES

Flannery O’Connor

American novelist, 1925—1964

A celebrated writer of the mid-20th century, Flannery O’Connor explored the dichotomy of light and darkness through her many stories and novels about seemingly ordinary people pruned and emptied of their illusions before they can face the truth. Diagnosed with lupus in childhood, O’Connor spent most of her life confined to her mother’s dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she developed her disciplined approach to her craft, as well as a deep aversion to sentimentality and piety.

Her Catholic faith defined her life and was the lens through which she viewed the world. While her stories can be dark, with often violent endings, O’Connor imbued them with a dimension of mystery, possibility, and a grace that ultimately heals. Through her work, O’Connor exemplified a life of faith without ambiguity, the virtue and responsibility of hope.

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Whittaker Chambers

American editor, 1901—1961

Whittaker Chambers was a writer, journalist, Soviet spy, and ultimately a fervent anti-Communist. Or, as William F. Buckley, Jr. called him, “the most important American defector from Communism.” Chambers was at the center of the most influential political trial of the 20th century: the Alger Hiss case, which was also the subject of his autobiographical tour de force, Witness.

Witness details the story of Chambers’ descent into the Communist underground and his return to a world of hope after finding the Christian faith. For Chambers, “religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom.” His work would embolden the anti-Communist movement in America and help inspire a generation of leaders. In 1984, President Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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Carmen Serdán

Heroine of the mexican revolution, 1875—1948

Often called the heroine of the Mexican Revolution, Carmen Serdán was a valuable collaborator in the Maderista anti-reelection campaign, a fight to prevent the sixth reelection of Porfirio Diaz, which was carried out in the Mexican state of Puebla. Committed to the cause, Serdán spied for the revolutionaries, clandestinely hitting subversive propaganda against the government and continuously exhibiting great bravery. With such a determined heart & mind, Serdán also invented an encrypted language to communicate with her brother Aquiles, which appeared in different newspapers—signed under the pseudonym Marcos Serrato. 

With the triumph of constitutionalism, Carmen Serdán retired to a private life and died in Puebla at the age of 73. In her memory, several schools, libraries, and other public buildings in Mexico bear her name.

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Etty Hillesum

Dutch mystic of the Holocaust, 1914—1943

Through her celebrated collection of diary entries, Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman living in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, captured the goodness and beauty of existence in the face of the darkness, making her book documenting the last two years of her life one of the great moral documents of our time. Despite little interest in organized religion, Hillesum possessed a passionate openness to life and to God, living a vocation to preserve the spirit of love and forgiveness.

Spared the concentration camps by working as a typist for the Jewish council, Hillesum heeded her sense of solidarity with those who suffer, giving up that position and volunteering to accompany her fellow Jews to the camp at Westerbork, then to Auschwitz, where she died at the age of 29.

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Franz Jägerstätter

German conscientious objector & martyr, 1907—1943

When Austria was invaded by the Nazis and annexed in 1938, most Austrians welcomed their new occupiers. However, one peasant from the village of St. Radegund felt otherwise. Known for his honesty and high principle, Franz Jägerstätter held a deep disdain for the Nazis, making it clear he would never serve in Hitler’s army. In 1943, he was served with his induction notice and ordered to report for duty.

Despite protestations from his family and neighbors, Jägerstätter refused to serve and was soon arrested and imprisoned. After being tried before a military court in Berlin, Jägerstätter was sentenced and executed as an enemy of the state. For his remarkable courage in the face of death and his absolute conviction in a higher morality than human law, Jägerstätter was declared a martyr by the Catholic Church in 1997 and eventually beatified in 2007.

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G.K. Chesterton

English journalist & apologist, 1874—1936

Known alternatively as the “Prince of Paradox,” “Apostle of Common Sense,” and “Troubadour of God,” Gilbert Keith Chesterton is the most-quoted writer in the English language after Shakespeare. Born in Kensington, England, he never went to college, but instead trained at art school. His friend George Bernard Shaw (with whom friendship remained despite their disagreement on virtually every subject) described him affectionately as “a large abounding gigantically cherubic person who seems to be growing larger as you look at him.”

Though a giant in every way—a massive mind in a massive body (he stood six feet, four inches and weighed more than 300 pounds), often with a cigar in his mouth—his personality led another Chesterton scholar to describe him as an “overgrown elf,” one who understood the importance of humility and how that virtue enables one to see what Chesterton considered the most perfectly divine thing: that “the one glimpse of God’s paradise on earth, is to fight a losing battle—and not lose it.”

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Harriet Tubman

American abolitionist, 1822—1913

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery. At age 27 she escaped by fleeing from Maryland to Pennsylvania, but immediately returned to rescue members of her family. Tubman would go on to personally rescue more than 60 enslaved African Americans over the course of some 13 missions, while assisting many more.

After the American Civil War began, she continued her liberation work by supporting Union forces as a nurse and then by leading scouts into enemy territory. Worn out and penniless after the war, Tubman nevertheless continued to assist other freed slaves, and even worked to promote the cause of women’s suffrage. Passionate in her faith in God and tenacious to the moment of her death, Tubman told those in the room: “I go to prepare a place for you.”

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Fr. Augustus Tolton

american catholic priest, 1854—1897

John Augustus Tolton was born a slave in Brush Creek, Missouri on April 1, 1954. Raised Catholic, he and his family courageously escaped their bondage at the height of the Civil War in 1862.

A gifted student, Tolton was allowed to study at the all-white St. Peter’s Catholic School in Quincy, graduated from college and was accepted into the novitiate of one of Rome’s most prestigious theological seminaries. Despite the adversities and racial conflict that would haunt Tolton his entire life, he remained devoted to his Catholic faith and trust in God.

In 1886, he became the first Black American priest in the United States.

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Fyodor Dostoevsky

Russian writer & thinker, 1821—1881

Fyodor Dostoevsky, a notorious Christian, monarchist, and anti-Marxist, was a prolific Russian novelist and philosopher. After finishing his first novella, Poor Folk, Dostoevsky was arrested for belonging to a literary group that was critical of tsarist Russia. As part of his punishment, he was mock-sentenced to death, then spared as he and others awaited the firing squad. The experience left a permanent mark on his soul. From it, he went on to write his masterpiece Crime and Punishment.

He spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, followed by six years of compulsory military service. Despite this severe punishment, Dostoevsky became a converted optimist, believing in the power of active love. In his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, he wrote: “Strive to love your neighbor actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul.”

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William Blake

English poet & visionary, 1757—1827

Although he lived in relative obscurity throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries, William Blake achieved his status as one of the most accomplished English poets of all time posthumously. Born in London, the son of a hosier, Blake was a consummate artist (he was an engraver by profession, as well as a poet and artist).

With a profound detestation of the materialist-collectivist society he saw around him, he was a committed but unorthodox Christian, one motivated by a rebellious nature and idiosyncratic theology, grounded in the belief of a “fearful symmetry,” which most fervently manifested itself as an intuitive protest against Christianity’s estrangement from the presence and reality of God. Blake valued imagination—the ability to see reality in its full spiritual grandeur—above all, making it a central theme of his writings and art.

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Blaise Pascal

French scientist & apologist, 1623—1662

Blaise Pascal displayed a prodigious talent for mathematics at an early age. By the time he reached adulthood, he had developed revolutionary mathematical theorems and produced prototypes of the world’s first mechanical calculators. Pascal seemed destined for a career in science when, at the age of 31, he experienced a profound religious vision leading him to forsake scientific exploration and turn wholly towards the spiritual.

He began using his scientific background to explain the existence of God, continuing down this path until conceiving of the concept for which he is universally known, Pascal’s Wager: If one cannot prove or disprove the existence of God, it only makes sense to live as if God does exist to ensure the protection of one’s soul. Ultimately, he believed, the only serious quest on earth is for God, and the way to Him is chartered in the Old Testament, sign-posted in the New, and illuminated by faith.

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William Shakespeare

English poet, playwright, & actor, 1564—1616

William Shakespeare is regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s most significant dramatist. His comedies, histories, and tragedies are considered among the finest ever written, and his body of work, which includes some 38 plays and 150 sonnets, has influenced the world’s theater, literature, poetry, and the English language itself.

Shakespeare’s soliloquies expanded the range of dramatic characterization by revealing the inner workings of his characters’ minds in a way never done so powerfully before or since. His art was equal to his genius; his judgment in characterization and dramatic fitness, impeccable; and his knowledge of life and human beings was not equaled by any other poet or playwright. Shakespeare’s contemporary and fellow playwright Ben Jonson said of him: “He was not of an age, but for all time.”  

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Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Spanish writer, 1547—1616

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish soldier, accountant, novelist, poet, and playwright. A veteran of the Battle of Lepanto, the pivotal turning point at which the Spanish forces withstood a Muslim invasion into Western Europe, Cervantes channeled these experiences into his writing and is widely considered the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world’s most significant novelists.

Cervantes’ influence on the Spanish language has been so great that it is often called “the language of Cervantes.” Despite his inability to support himself with income from his writing, Fyodor Dostoevsky called Don Quixote “the ultimate and most sublime work of human thinking.” It is considered by some to be both the first modern novel and the best work of fiction ever written.

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Francois Rabelais

French Renaissance writer, physician, & monk, 1483—1553

Coming of age at the dawn of the 16th century in France, the writer François Rabelais first became a Franciscan friar, then left to join the Benedictines who allowed more freedom to study. He would again leave the order to study medicine, but ultimately found himself a writer, known for his fantastical and satirical work.  

Rabelais explored his world from a Christian humanist’s perspective, as presented in his allegorical series beginning with Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes. Through the lives of the giants in his books, he examined the idea of living a freer life released from the stricter religious and educational norms of the day. His writing revealed the sense that freedom was the best spur to living noble and generous lives. His last words, “I go to seek a Great Perhaps” so adroitly captured his endlessly curious spirit.

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Andrei Rublev

Russian iconographer, d. 1430

A monk in the 15th century, Andrei Rublev became the most widely revered iconographer in early Christian history. Rublev understood that as used in worship, icons were not intended to serve as “realistic” portraits, much less as works of decorative art, but rather as a window linking earthly and heavenly realities.  

One leading scholar described his icons as characterized by a lightness and delicacy of style, a balance between tradition and innovation, and an unusually creative representation of theological mystery. For this reason, Rublev brought the icon to a new level of artistic and spiritual depth and inspired a school of faithful imitators from his highly “spiritualized” depictions of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. The Russian Orthodox Church canonized him in 1988.

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Dante Alighieri

Italian poet, 1265—1321

From the late Middle Ages when the Commedia was written to the present, Dante Alighieri has inflamed readers’ imaginations of hell, purgatory, and heaven through his epic masterpiece which traces the arc of a pilgrim’s progress from moral confusion to a vision of God. This original work of genius has had a dramatic influence on much of the great Western literature that followed, including works by Milton, Chaucer, and Tennyson, as well as countless depictions of heaven and hell.

T.S. Eliot concluded: “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them, there is no third.” Considered the greatest work of Italian literature, The Divine Comedy was written in a unique language Dante dubbed “Italian,” based primarily on Tuscan vernacular, making it widely accessible at the time and providing a foundation for establishing Italian as a literary language. Dante is an artist in the fullest sense of the word; and his Commedia is and will remain the last miracle of world poetry. 

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Jesus of Nazareth

Revolutionary & Son of man, C. 4—36

Born in first-century Palestine, Jesus of Nazareth—the central figure of the human story, who brings together history, literature, mythology, science, and religion—was the world’s original influencer and revolutionary, the “true light that first shone bright in Galilee,” as Muggeridge wrote.

Chesterton described the most important trait of his personality thus: “He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.”

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