A Catholic parish is torn apart when two of its members are accused of murder The year 1806 is not a good time to be Catholic in Boston. When a man is brutally killed on the Boston Post Road, two unsuspecting Irishmen are charged with the crime. For five months they rot in prison, denied a lawyer until just two days before the hearing. It is a mockery of justice—a one-day trial that results in a unanimous verdict: The Irishmen will be hanged, dissected, and dismembered. Comforting them falls to Father Cheverus, a French émigré struggling to adapt to life in the New World. It is his duty to help the condemned find peace, but any overture he makes to the prisoners will be met with an anti-Catholic backlash that could destroy his fledgling congregation. As he walks a fraught path, the priest must decide: Is his obligation to his flock, or to God?

Among the characters you'll find in this collection of twelve stories by Tobias Wolff are a teenage boy who tells morbid lies about his home life, a timid professor who, in the first genuine outburst of her life, pours out her opinions in spite of a protesting audience, a prudish loner who gives an obnoxious hitchhiker a ride, and an elderly couple on a golden anniversary cruise who endure the offensive conviviality of the ship's social director. Fondly yet sharply drawn, Wolff's characters stumble over each other in their baffled yet resolute search for the "right path."

Two Irish Catholic immigrants, Dominic Daley and James Halligan, were traveling west on the Boston Post Road, headed for New York. A man named Marcus Lyon was robbed and killed along the same road. Though the two Irishmen denied any knowledge of the crime, they were arrested and accused of the murder. They spent five months in jail. Only two days before their trial they were allowed to consult with a lawyer. The trial, a mockery of justice, lasted only one day. The two were sentenced to be hanged by the neck and, as the presiding judge said, "their bodies dissected and anatomized." Father Cheverus, an émigré priest from France and one of only two Roman Catholic priests in all of New England at the time, is asked by Daley's wife and mother to go to the cell to comfort them, listen to their confessions, offer them communion. Father Cheverus, who escaped the Terror of the French Revolution, is a man plagued by his own past. Daley, a simple family man with a young son, and Halligan, a slick type with a checkered past and a lost love, face their deaths bravely, only to be exonerated in 1984. Michael White has used his considerable talent to capture the political, social and cultural aspects of New England. In this heartbreaking story, he shows that the anti-Catholic and anti-foreign sentiments of that period in some ways reflect ongoing prejudice today.

The history of Iran in the late twentieth century is a chronicle of religious fervor and violent change -- from the Islamic Revolution that ousted the Shah in favor of a rigid fundamentalist government to the bloody eight-year war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. But what happened to the hostage-takers, the suicidal holy warriors, the martyrs, and the mullahs responsible for the now moribund revolution? Is modern Iran a society at peace with itself and the world, or truly a dangerous spoke in the "Axis of Evil"? Christopher de Bellaigue, a Western journalist married to an Iranian woman and a longtime resident of a prosperous suburb of Tehran, offers a stunning insider's view of a culture hitherto hidden from American eyes, and reveals the true hearts and minds of an extraordinary people.

This book was first published in 2006. Second only to the Bible and Book of Common Prayer, John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, known as the Book of Martyrs, was the most influential book published in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The most complex and best-illustrated English book of its time, it recounted in detail the experiences of hundreds of people who were burned alive for their religious beliefs. John N. King offers the most comprehensive investigation yet of the compilation, printing, publication, illustration, and reception of the Book of Martyrs. He charts its reception across different editions by learned and unlearned, sympathetic and antagonistic readers. The many illustrations included here introduce readers to the visual features of early printed books and general printing practices both in England and continental Europe, and enhance this important contribution to early modern literary studies, cultural and religious history, and the history of the Book.

What would you do for the cross of Christ? For two thousand years, Christians have courageously triumphed over beatings, stonings, burnings, wild beasts, and every form of evil to boldly proclaim one truth: the name of Jesus. Voices of the Martyrs AD 33 – Today is their story and your Christian heritage. In the 16th century, English preacher John Foxe created what would later be called the “second most important book in history” after the Bible: Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. With dozens of images, modernized English, and up-to-date accounts, Foxe: Voices of the Martyrs faithfully binds the testimonies of more than 50 of Foxe’s heroes from the Early Church to the Reformation with Christians in the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and through the twentieth century. More importantly, Foxe: Voices of the Martyrs unites past Christians with believers today. Building on over fifty years of ministry to persecuted Christians, The Voice of the Martyrs organization shares sixty-seven stories of Christians who have stood faithfully to the death since 2000. Their courage in the face of ISIS and the Taliban, brutal dictatorships, and government crackdowns will inspire you to boldness and remind you that the same Spirit of Christ Who strengthened Stephen, Peter, and Paul is at work in you today.

In China's Book of Martyrs, the first of the Fire amp; Blood series, Paul Hattaway charts the story of the Christian church in China from the earliest beginnings to present day. This comprehensive first volume tells the stories of those who have died for their faith in Christ in China, from all creeds or denominations and nationalities, including indigenous Chinese believers. Its features are: 1. History of the Christian church in China listed province by province from AD 845 to the present. 2. All denominations and creeds included. 3. All known martyrs included around 1000 named individuals or groups 501 profiles. 4. Includes over 2000 footnotes and source references, an extensive bibliography and indexes that list martyrs per country of origin and province in China where they were martyred. 5. Contains more than 500 black and white photos or drawings All those interested in the church movement, especially within China, will find this resource invaluable to their studies.

Introduced by Donald Smith. Set in Rome during Nero’s reign of terror, The Blood of the Martyrs is a disciplined historical novel tracing the destruction of one cell of the early church. With a cast of slaves, ordinary Roman people, exiles and entertainers, it is thorough in its historical interpretation and in its determination to make the past accessible and readable. Written in 1938-9, the novel contains many symbolic parallels to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s and the desperate plight of persecuted minorities such as the Jews and the left-wing activists with whom Naomi Mitchison personally campaigned at the time. With the invasion of Britain a real possibility, she felt compelled to write a testament to the power of human solidarity which, even faced with death, can overcome the worst that human evil can achieve. The Blood of the Martyrs is the least autobiographical of Mitchison’s major works of fiction, yet, with its implicit credo, is her most passionately self-revealing. ‘ . . . when a novelist is historically faithful in these treacherous waters of the human psyche, the results are tremendous. As a twentieth-century woman, it no doubt hurt Naomi Mitchison a good deal to describe the savagery of the early Christian persecution in The Blood of the Martyrs . . . But it is the pain that gives the history its lifeblood. The imagination that is a novelist’s fuel must be harnessed to serve history as history was, not as anyone wishes it had been.’ Joanna Trollope

An old woman shares a story of violence and tragedy during World War II when Marci asks her to make her beautiful.

Fantastic portmanteu featuring the stoic warriors of the Adepta Sororitas. To die in the name of the God-Emperor of Mankind is to live eternal, and none are more willing to bleed in His name than the Adepta Sororitas – the Sisters of Battle. The Book of Martyrs charts the deaths of these exemplars. Sister Ishani of the Orders Hospitaller, serving alongside the death-obsessed Valorous Heart, tends to her Ecclesiarchy charges as something inhuman hunts the fields. Sister Anarchia of the Order of Our Martyred Lady, taken captive by the vile T’au Empire, seeks to teach her interrogators what it truly means to be one of the faithful. On a regressed Imperial world, Sister Superior Laurelyn of the Order of the Bloody Rose reinforces the beleaguered defenders against a familiar foe turned anew by the Great Rift. And in the age of the Indomitus Crusade, with the galaxy split in two, only one thing is certain – there will be no shortage of martyrs to fill the pages of this ancient tome.