Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

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.

To be human is to be a moral agent. That, in turn, meant that we live in a human universe the very structure of which is dramatic. And the great drama of any life is the struggle to surrender the “person-I-am” to the “person-I-ought-to-be.”

That refinement was only possible, however, because of the original perception. Rather than being a hideous cruelty or an absurdity, the self-sacrificing death of Jesus Christ—which was then vindicated by his resurrection into a new and superabundant form of life—is the axial point of human history. Here, in the death and resurrection of Christ, th

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

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.

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

Each of us, he came to understand, lives in a dramatic situation, for we live each day in the gap between the person-I-am and the person-I-ought-to-be. Understanding that, we come to grasp that life is never dull or repetitive; living in such a way as to close the gap between who-I-am-now and what-I-aspire-to-be is inherently dramatic, adventurous,

Much of late modernity assumes that dependence on God is a mark of human immaturity and an obstacle to human freedom.

his soul had been formed by a different experience, an experience of the Church as the bearer of the most potent vision of human possibility on offer.