Sister Agatha is one of two extern nuns in the cloistered order at the Our Lady of Hope Monastery near the small desert town of Bernalillo, New Mexico. An investigative journalist before entering the monastery, now, as an extern it is Sister Agatha's role to be the link between her cloistered sisters and the outside world. It is the skills from both her past and current lives that she must bring to the task assigned to her by the Archbishop of her...

When John Blessing dies and leaves behind two small children, the loss reverberates across his extended family for years to come.

In the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them, in works that readers of all kinds could admire. This book is their story, a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us. Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "Christ-haunted" literary...

"Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy was the incandescent life-force of the fabled Kennedy family, her father's acknowledged "favorite of all the children" and her brother Jack's "psychological twin." She was the Kennedy of Kennedys, sure of her privilege, magnetically charming and somehow not quite like anyone else on whatever stage she happened to grace. The daughter of the American ambassador to the Court of St. James's, Kick swept into Britain's aristocracy...

The hero of Christine Falls, Quirke, is a surly pathologist living in 1950s Dublin. One night, after having a few drinks at a party, he returns to the morgue to find his brother-in-law tampering with the records on a young woman's corpse. The next morning, when his hangover has worn off, Quirke reluctantly begins looking into the woman's history. He discovers a plot that spans two continents, implicates the Catholic Church, and may just involve members...

A fiftieth-anniversary edition of the 1948 spiritual autobiography of Thomas Merton, a young man whose search for peace and faith led him to join the religious order of the Trappist monks. A modern-day Confessions of Saint Augustine, The Seven Storey Mountain is one of the most influential religious works of the twentieth century. This edition contains an introduction by Merton's editor, Robert Giroux, and a note to the reader by biographer William...

"In 1936 San Francisco, eighteen-year-old Willa MacCarthy is bound for the convent. But when she discovers her love of medicine, she will defy her family and work with a female doctor to care for those building the Golden Gate Bridge"-- Provided by publisher.