Heroes of the faith

When Pope John Paul II beatified Mother Teresa (1910-1997) in October 2003, Magnum photographer Raghu Rai had already paid homage to the extraordinary sister and her exemplary destiny. Know for his numerous reportages on India, especially on Bhopal, Rai met Mother Teresa in the early 1970s. Fascinated by someone who, from the age of twelve, was fully aware of her "mission," he continued to photograph her until her death in 1997. In 1928, when she was only eighteen, she left Macedonia to join the Sisters of Loreto, a community of nuns in Ireland with missions in India. After a few month' training in Dublin, she was sent to India, where on May 24, 1931, she took her initial vows as a nun, choosing the name Teresa in honor of Saint Theresa of Lisieux. From 1931 to 1948, Mother Teresa taught in Kolkata (Calcutta), but the suffering and poverty she glimpsed outside the convent made such a deep impression on her that in 1948 she received permission from her superiors to leave the convent school and devote herself to working in the slums of Kolkata. In October 1950, seh started her own order, Thhe Missionaries of Charity, whose primary thask was to love and care for those persons nobody else was prepared to look after. Less than two years after her death, Pope John Paul II permitted the opening of her Cause of Canonization. On December 20, 2002, a decree approved Mother Teresa's heroic virtues and the miracle attributed to her intercession. The relationship of trust that Raghu Rai and Mother Teresa gradually built up is very apparent in the photographer's work. He observed her daily life and that of her community, successfully conveying its prayerful intensity and strength of Kolkata, where the everpresent poverty and distress illustrated the need for Mother Teresa's work. With nearly a hundred black-and-white photographs, punctuated by anecdotal texts that recall their encounters, Rai has captured the strength of Mother Teresa's commitment and her daily fight against poverty.

On March 19th, 1913, a hundred years will have passed since David Livingstone was born. It is only forty years since his body was carried by faithful hands from the centre of Africa to the coast that he might be buried among his peers in Westminster Abbey. Nothing that has happened since has diminished by a single laurel the wreath he won, and will wear for ever. With every decade his fame greatens; and whatever our views on African problems might be, we may all agree that her white population may well pray for a double portion of his spirit. The present biography aspires to present his life to those in our busy century who ask for short measure and a clear, simple narrative of facts. The author has not aimed so much at telling the story as at allowing the story to tell itself. It may be added that, in the belief of the writer, Livingstone is greatest, not as a scientist, nor an explorer, but as a man and a missionary. - Preface.

Follows the life of the seventeenth-century English preacher, writer, and servant of God, describing his spiritual growth, defense of religious dissent, and years spent in prison writing "Pilgrim's Progress" and other books.