Monthly Archives: February 2012

Early in the year 597, a small band of Benedictine monks, sent as missionaries to the English by Pope Gregory the Great under the leadership of Augustine, prior of the pope’s own monastery on the Coelian Hill in Rome, landed … Continue reading →

Polycarp was one of the leaders of the Church who carried on the tradition of the apostles through the troubled period of Gnostic heresies in the second century. According to Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, who had known him in his … Continue reading →

Born in 1483 at Eisleben, Martin Luther entered the University of Erfurt in 1501 and completed his Master of Arts in 1505. His father wished him to become a lawyer, but Martin was drawn to the study of the Scriptures … Continue reading →

On 6 January 1948 a young school teacher, Janani Luwum, was converted to the charismatic Christianity of the East African Revival, in his own village in Acholiland, Uganda. At once he turned evangelist, warning against the dangers of drink and … Continue reading →

Thomas Bray, an English country parson, was invited in 1696 by Henry Compton, the Bishop of London, to have oversight of the Church’s work in Maryland as the Bishop’s Commisary. Long delayed by legal complications, Bray set sail for America … Continue reading →

Cyril and Methodius, brothers born in Thessalonika, are honored as apostles to the southern Slavs and as the founders of Slavic literary culture. Cyril, who was originally named Constantine, was a student of philosophy and a deacon who eventually became … Continue reading →

Absalom Jones was born into slavery in 1746 in Delaware.  He taught himself to read from the New Testament, among other books.  At sixteen, he was sold to a store owner in Philadelphia, where he attended a night school for … Continue reading →

In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731, the Venerable Bede tells of an elderly lay brother, a herdsman named Caedmon, in the abbey of Streonæshalch at Whitby, presided over by the abbess Hilda (died 680, commemorated … Continue reading →

All that we know of Scholastica comes from the Dialogues of Gregory the Great. Sister of Benedict, the Abbot of Monte Cassino and father of Western monasticism, she too was born at Nursia in central Italy, around the year 480. … Continue reading →