Walker Percy
Walker Alexander Percy, a writer who was raised in Greenville, Mississippi, was born to Leroy and Martha Percy on May 28, 1916, in Birmingham, Alabama. His parents later had two other sons, Phin and Roy. Young Walker had a hard life. At the tender age of thirteen, his father, a successful lawyer in Birmingham, took his own…
Read MoreAnton Chekhov
The anti-heroine of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, Hanna Schmitz, is illiterate, and serving a life sentence in prison. She is sustained mentally by tape recordings, sent to her by a well-educated former lover. In the film of the book, the tape with which she begins to teach herself to read begins: “People were saying that someone…
Read MoreDavid Livingstone
A young Scotsman had come to hear an address by a celebrated missionary. Following his conversion several years earlier, the young man had begun to grapple with the question, “What shall I do with my life?” The Great Commission had come to have a singular hold upon his mind. Its majestic syllables had for him…
Read MoreHildegard of Bingen
Abbess, artist, author, composer, mystic, pharmacist, poet, preacher, theologian—where to begin in describing this remarkable woman? Born into a noble family, she was instructed for ten years by the holy woman Blessed Jutta. When Hildegard was 18, she became a Benedictine nun at the Monastery of Saint Disibodenberg. Ordered by her confessor to write down the…
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