The Enthusiast: How the Best Friend of Francis of Assisi Almost Destroyed What He Started
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About this ebook
Few biographies of St. Francis have examined his complicated relationship with close friend Elias of Cortona. In The Enthusiast, award-winning author and historian Jon M. Sweeney delves into this little-known partnership that defined and then almost destroyed Francis’s ideals.
Blending history and biography, Sweeney reveals how Francis and Elias rebuilt churches, aided lepers, and entertained as “God’s troubadours” to the delight of everyday people who had grown tired of a remote and tumultuous Church. At the height of their spiritual renaissance, however, Elias became “the devil” to many of the other friars; they believed him to be a traitor to their ideals. After Francis’s premature death, the movement fractured. Scorned by most of the Franciscan leadership, Elias followed a path that would leave him a lonely, broken man. Sweeney shows how Elias’s undoing was rooted in his attempts to honor his old friend.
The Enthusiast was the winner of a 2017 Catholic Press Association Book Award: History (Third Place).
Jon M. Sweeney
Jon M. Sweeney is an award-winning author who has been interviewed in the Dallas Morning News and The Irish Catholic, and on television at CBS Saturday Morning. His book, The Pope Who Quit, (Doubleday/Image) was optioned by HBO. He is also author of forty other books on spirituality, mysticism, and religion, including Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart, with Mark S. Burrows (Hampton Roads), the biography Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Catechist, Saint (Liturgical Press), and Thomas Merton: An Introduction to His Life and Practices (St. Martin’s Essentials and Penguin Random House Audio, 2021). His bookish reputation is nothing new. In 2014, Publishers Weekly featured Jon in an interview titled, “A Life in Books and On the Move.” He began the 1990s as a theological bookseller in Cambridge, and ended the decade founding a multifaith publishing house, SkyLight Paths Publishing, in Vermont. He’s worked in books and publishing ever since. Today he writes, reviews, edits, and recommends books, speaks regularly at literary and religious conferences, is a Catholic married to a rabbi, and is active on social media (Twitter @jonmsweeney; Facebook jonmsweeney). Sweeney lives in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee.
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