Pandita Ramabai, the daughter of a wealthy Brahmin scholar and his much younger wife, was born in Karnataka, India. Having been instructed by her father to read Sanskrit, she set…

Maria Kutschera, who was orphaned at seven, grew up with no interest in religion; for the “holy water girls” in her class, she felt only scorn. Yet, while studying to…

Chiara Lubich, a schoolteacher and Third Order Franciscan, was born in Trent, Italy. Her true vocation took form in 1943 under the Allied bombing of her city when she and…

Martin Niemoeller served as a highly decorated German U-boat commander in World War I. Though he became a Lutheran pastor, he continued to dream of national glory and initially welcomed…

This day commemorates the heroic charity of Christians during an outbreak of plague in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in 261. So virulent was the disease that every house in…

St. Margaret was raised in a poor family in Tuscany. After the death of her mother, when she was eleven, her new stepmother turned her out of the house. Eventually…

The French artist Georges Rouault began his career as an apprentice in a studio for stained-glass restoration, an experience that influenced his painting style—easily recognized by the use of color…

At the age of nine, Bakhita was kidnapped from her village in southern Sudan and sold into slavery. For years, she was sold from one set of masters to another,…

Born in Alabama, Coretta Scott studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she met her future husband, Martin Luther King Jr., a graduate student at Boston…

By the age of forty, William Wilson, a Wall Street analyst and hopeless alcoholic, felt he had reached a dead end. In 1935, after repeated hospitalizations, and having tried other…