Garry Wills

Bestselling author of Papal Sin and Why I Am a Catholic, Garry Wills spent five years as a young man at a Jesuit seminary and nearly became a priest himself. But after a lifetime of study and reflection, he now poses some challenging questions: Why do we need priests at all? Why did the priesthood arise in a religion that began without it and opposed it? Would Christianity be stronger without the priesthood, as it was at its outset? Meticulously researched,...

Garry Wills takes on the romantic myths surrounding the Kennedy clan in this thought-provoking examination of electoral politics and the power of image in America. Wills argues that the much-admired dynasty, beginning with patriarch Joe Kennedy, created a corrupt climate where appearances were more important than reality, truth was discarded when it wasn't convenient, and an assortment of devoted loyalists sacrificed integrity for the sake of reflected...

Garry Wills is the bestselling author of many books on religion and American history, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lincoln at Gettysburg, a biography of Augustine, and a translation of Augustine's Confessions. From Pulitzer Prize–winner Garry Wills, the story of Augustine's Confessions In this brief and incisive book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills tells the story of the Confessions--what motivated Augustine to dictate...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Lincoln at Gettysburg" brings his eloquence, wit, and on-target perceptions of American life and politics to this fascinating, well-drawn protrait of a twentieth-century hero. In this work of great originality, the biography of an idea, Garry Wills shows how John Wayne came to embody Amercian values and influenced our cultoure to a degree unmatched by any other public figure of his time. In Wills's hands, Wayne's...

A landmark examination of Christianity's place in American life across the broad sweep of this country's history, from the Puritans to the presidential administration of George W. Bush. The struggle within American Christianity, Garry Wills argues, now and throughout our country's history, is between the head and the heart: between reason and emotion, Enlightenment and Evangelism. Why has this been so? How has the tension between the two poles played...

For centuries, Augustine's writings have moved and fascinated readers. With the fresh, keen eye of a writer whose own intellectual analysis has won him a Pulitzer Prize, Gary Wills examines this famed fourth-century bishop and seminal thinker whose grounding in classical philosophy informed his influential interpretation of the Christian doctrines of mind and body, wisdom and God. Saint Augustine explores both the great ruminator on the human condition...

In what are billed as "culture wars," people on the political right and the political left cite Jesus as endorsing their views. Wills argues that Jesus subscribed to no political program--He was far more radical than that. It is only by dodges and evasions that people misrepresent what Jesus plainly had to say against power, the wealthy, and religion itself. Jesus came from the working class, and he spoke to and for that class. This book will challenge...

"Shakespeare's plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a performance: Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of other playwrights of the era as well, Marlowe's Edward II and Tamburlaine among them. But Elizabethan playwrights were not alone in realizing that a sense of theater was essential to the exercise of...