devotion
Did it all for someone — or something — and never wavered.
Fiolxhilde
Johannes Kepler wrote a short story about a witch who sends her son to the Moon; years after the manuscript leaked, his own mother was on trial as a witch.
English in Heaven
In 1922, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle explained that Houdini's dead Jewish mother must have learned English in heaven.
Egg Yolk, Rose Oil, Turpentine
One night in October 1537, a French army surgeon ran out of the boiling oil he was supposed to pour into gunshot wounds, and improvised a dressing of egg yolk, rose oil, and turpentine.
Sticks for the Spires
He was thrown out of a Trappist monastery with tuberculosis at thirty-five, and spent the next sixty years alone on a plot outside Madrid, building a cathedral with factory-reject bricks and pillars cast inside oil drums.
Up to His Neck
He walked into the North Sea at night until the water reached his neck, and sang psalms until dawn.
The Friar Who Kept Flying
What happens when a monk so incompetent he nearly wasn't ordained starts doing something no one can explain or contain?
The Man Who Let Gravity Draw
What kind of architect designs a church by hanging it upside down from a shed ceiling?
The Man Who Signed a Treaty With a Wolf
In 1220, when a wolf was eating the citizens of Gubbio, a barefoot friar walked out alone to negotiate terms.
The Servant of Jesus
In 1602 the Jesuits sent a former soldier to walk from India to China in disguise to settle a geography argument — what could possibly go wrong?
Paint Sacred Art
What does a 59-year-old Baptist preacher do when a face appears in a smudge of paint on his fingertip and tells him to start painting?
The Literalist
What does a sixteen-year-old do when his mother hides his clothes to keep him from following his father to the executioner?
The Ping-Pong Ball
What are the odds the first autobiography in English survived because a colonel hunting a ping-pong ball was talked out of burning it?