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Garry Wills is the author of many books, including Bomb Power, What Jesus Meant, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
After graduating from Xavier, Wills was hired to work as the drama critic for National Review magazine, where he became a close personal friend and protégé of founding editor William F. Buckley. But as the winds of change blew across the 1960s, Wills got caught up in the cross-currents. A staunch Catholic anti-Communist in his youth, he began to drift away from political conservatism, galvanized by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam debate. He parted ways with National Review and began writing for more liberal-leaning publications like Esquire and the New York Review of Books, a defection that left him slightly estranged from Buckley for many years. (They reconciled before Buckley's death in 2008.)
In 1961, while he was still in grad school, Wills's first book, Chesterton: Man and Mask was published. [It was revised and reissued in 2001 with a new author's introduction.] Since then, the prolific Wills has gone on to pen critically acclaimed nonfiction that roams across history, politics, and religion. He expanded one of his Esquire articles into Nixon Agonistes (1970), a probing profile John Leonard said "...reads like a combination of H. L. Mencken, John Locke and Albert Camus." (The book landed Wills on the famous Nixon's Enemies List.) He has also written penetrating studies of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Wayne, and Saint Paul; he has won two National Book Critics Circle Awards; and his 1992 book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Something of a rara avis, Wills is a Catholic intellectual who has produced thoughtful, scholarly books on religion in America. His translations of St. Augustine have received glowing reviews, and he has acted both as an outspoken critic of the Church (Papal Sin) and as an ardent advocate for his own faith Why I Am a Catholic). Proof of his accessibility can be found in the fact that several of his religion books have become bestsellers.
Key to Brief Citations
Illustration List Map of Milan Introduction: Tale of a Font
I. Milan
1. Ambrose's Town
2. Ambrosian Disicipline
3. Ambrose Fights for His Churches
4. Augustine on the Way to Milan
5. Augustine in Milan
II. The Baptism
6. Augustine Approaches the Font
7. Augustine at the Font
8. After the Font
III. Hippo
9. Baptism in Africa
10. The Ritual
11. Augustine Needs Ambrose
Index
Anonymous
Posted February 3, 2013
(Ohhh. TNT WE KNOW DRAMA! LOLLOLOLOL SO WHEN UR IN THE CAGE WHAT DO I DO?)
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Posted February 3, 2013
What kind of fetus? Pig fetus?
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Posted February 3, 2013
*let you out and runs to camp*
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Posted February 3, 2013
Hey...will you tell everyone that im locked out of result one and two?
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Posted April 3, 2012
The book was ordered but never received.
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Overview
No two men were more influential in the early Church than Ambrose, the powerful Bishop of Milan, and Augustine, the philosopher from provincial Africa who would write The Confessions and The City of God. Different in background, they were also extraordinarily different in personality. In Font of Life, Garry Wills explores the remarkable moment when their lives intersected at one of the most important, yet rarely visited, sites in the Christian world. Hidden under the piazza of the Duomo in Milan lies part of the...