Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

Mysticism, the interior dialogue with a personal yet ineffable God, is not something peripheral to the human condition. It is central to knowing the human person, and the tensions built into the human encounter with the infinite are the key to the drama of human life. We cannot really know others unless we know them as persons called to communion w

Given the intensely personal nature of the encounter with God, the human person must enjoy freedom, for an authentic relationship of mutual self-giving can only be entered freely. The certainty that emerges from that relationship is not the kind achieved by completing an algebraic equation. It is the certainty that emerges from the human heart, whi

In his dissertation, Wojtyła emphasized the personal nature of the human encounter with God, in which believers transcend the boundaries of their creaturely existence in such a way that they become more truly and completely themselves. This encounter with the living God is not for mystics only. It is the center of every Christian life.

Listen, when cadences of knocking hammers so much their own I transfer into our inner life, to test the strength of each blow— Listen: electric current cuts through a river of rock— Then the thought grows in me day after day, The whole greatness of this work dwells inside a man.

Work, with all its rigors and hardships, was a participation in God’s creativity, because work touched the very essence of the human being as the creature to whom God had given dominion over the earth.

Plus ratio quam vis: “Reason rather than force.”

To understand Pope John Paul II “from inside” is to understand that, for him, hope for the human prospect is rooted in faith.

The secular argument for human freedom, launched almost three centuries ago under the rubric of “natural rights,” has often been reduced to a calculation of probabilities: democracy and the personal freedoms it protects are good not because they have an inherent moral superiority over other forms of organizing society, but because they are the leas

that a man who has been seized and transformed by the “more excellent way” can bend the curve of history so that freedom’s cause is advanced.