With Exiles, Ron Hansen tells the story of a notorious shipwreck that prompted Gerard Manley Hopkins to break years of "elected silence" with an outpouring of dazzling poetry.In December 1875 the steamship Deutschland left Bremen, bound for England and then America. On board were five young nuns who, exiled by Bismarck's laws against Catholic religious orders, were going to begin their lives anew in Missouri. Early one morning, the ship ran aground in the Thames an...

In this retelling of one of the great classic tales of the American West, James comes across as a complex character, a new age type with an interest in parapsychology and alternative medicine, a farmer, a family man and a stone-cold killer.

The Journey Continues: Ministry Facing Challenge and Change will travel though the mountain and plains states. The quest for meaning that began in Journey to God will be expanded through the challenges and changes of raising a family, facing the ever changing expectations of ministers, church, and faith in God.Our young family is now a family with teenagers, driver licenses, cars, and dating. The one-salaried family becomes a two-salaried family with positive and negative reactions...

Is God for real? Is there any meaning to life? These are the questions that urged a nine-year-old to start a quest that has lasted over sixty-nine years. The journey goes from coast to coast and from border to border.The events run the gamut of the last half of the previous century: racial prejudice, school integration, Vietnam debates, and the place of Christianity in our sociopolitical society.The accounts describe facing violence without fear, and finding solutions to co...

In Hotly in Pursuit of the Real, the beloved bestselling novelist Ron Hansen opens the doors of his writing studio to share with us his passions for history, scandal, theology, Jesuits, the American West, and golf (which he plays even in bad weather). If Hansen's novels explore people very different from himself--from a stigmatic nun to a Victorian poet to Billy the Kid, and even Hitler's niece--the meditations in this book do the opposite, allowing us to glimpse the wellsprings of his ima...

Deep Down Things: Essays on Catholic Culture explores common threads that characterize Catholicism. The contributors look successively at: Catholic culture and everyday life of the parish and of work, at Catholic culture and the imaginative life of poets and fiction writers, and at Catholic culture and postmodern life where individual conscience, skepticism, and relativism challenge Church authority and faith itself. They do so while looking for foundational components that persist and com...

Aged 65, Emmett Dalton is the last survivor of the legendary Dalton gang. Now he lives off his memories in Hollywood. Combining fact and fiction, Ron Hansen depicts the outlaw past of the Daltons and the West they travelled. The Dalton brothers turn from being peace officers in the Indian territories to a life of rustling. When their leader, Bob, meets Eugenia Moore, a schoolteacher who begins to plan their robberies, they become the most notorious outlaws of their time.As their ra...

One of the most highly acclaimed and best-selling novels of 1991, Mariette in Ecstasy inspires even the most discriminating listener to some degree of reverence. This captivating story of faith and divine madness may move you to examine your own belief system. Since the tender age of four, Mariette Baptiste has had visions of her Savior. Now, at 17, she is entering the convent to dedicate her life to Him. At first, she is welcomed and admired. Then she begins to bleed from stigmata, and th...

Ron Hansen has won an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for his rich writing and poetic style. Atticus begins in the vein of a contemporary western. As it unfolds, it includes an intriguing murder mystery and a dramatic parable of the prodigal son. For years, prosperous Colorado rancher Atticus Cody has tried to understand his rootless son, Scott, who is now living a marginal life in Mexico. When he learns that Scott is dead, apparently by suic...

Everything about the ranch is a mystery. Rumours abound about the millionaire who owns it, the women who live with him and the sudden disappearances. Joe Pickett is tasked by the governor to find the truth. There are two other men living up at the ranch. One is a stone-cold killer who takes an instant dislike to Joe. The first man doesn't frighten him. But the second is another story entirely.

The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton arrive in North Carolina to create a timber empire. Although George has already lived in the camp long enough to father an illegitimate child, Serena is new to the mountains—but she soon shows herself to be the equal of any worker, overseeing crews, hunting rattlesnakes, even saving her husband's life in the wilderness.Together Serena and George ruthlessly kill or vanquish all who fall out of their favor. But when Serena l...

“A powerful new epic . . . [Kingsolver] has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.” —Los Angeles Times Book ReviewThe Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need f...