William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison, born in 1805 in the seaside town of Newburyport, Massachusetts, came of age in a nation teetering between the ideals of liberty and the brutal realities of human bondage. The son of a struggling Baptist mother and an absent father, Garrison was raised in poverty and piety. His mother, Frances Maria Garrison,…
Read MoreMalcolm Muggeridge
Malcolm Muggeridge, a prolific British journalist and caustic social critic, died yesterday in a nursing home in Sussex, England. He was 87 years old. His lawyer, Vernor Miles, said Mr. Muggeridge had never fully recovered from a stroke he suffered three years ago. Possessing an impeccable prose style and an unerring sense of the absurd,…
Read MoreDorothy Day
Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn, New York on November 8, 1897, the third child of Grace and John Day. Her nominally religious family moved to the San Franciso Bay area and then to Chicago where she was baptized in the Episcopal Church. She attended the University of Illinois at Urbana and became interested in…
Read MoreG.K. Chesterton
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) cannot be summed up in one sentence. Nor in one paragraph. In fact, in spite of the fine biographies that have been written of him, he has never been captured between the covers of one book. But rather than waiting to separate the goats from the sheep, let’s just come right…
Read MoreFyodor Dostoevsky
“Life is in ourselves and not in the external,” writes Fyodor Dostoevsky in a letter to his brother dated December 22, 1849. “To be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter–this is what life is, herein lies its task.”…
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