SkyLight Paths is the publisher of many award-winning personal growth books for people of all faith traditions—and none. Daniel Berrigan, S.J., is a Catholic priest who was one of the most eloquent voices protesting the Vietnam War in the 1960s, and who has continued to be an outspoken activist against social injustice. He has been arrested more than ... Read morefifty times and has spent many months in federal prisons. Berrigan is the author of numerous books, including (with Thich Nhat Hanh) The Raft Is Not the Shore: Conversations toward a Buddhist-Christian Awareness and is an accomplished poet. He lives in New York City. Saint Francis of Assisi (c. 1181–1226), Christian saint who founded the Franciscan religious order and is known for his love of all creatures. Born in England in 1844, Gerard Manley Hopkins began writing poetry at an early age. In his early twenties, Hopkins converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism and in 1868 joined the Society of Jesuits. Hopkins continued to write poems thereafter, while serving as a priest and university teacher, but he burned most of his early poems out of a deep sense of conflict between his art and his faith, and he published very little in his lifetime."God's Grandeur" appeared in the first collection of his poems, edited by his friend Robert Bridges and published in 1918, long after the poet's death in 1889. Thomas à Kempis (also known as Thomas Hemerken) d. 1471, was a late medieval Catholic monk. John Philip Newell, internationally acclaimed teacher, retreat leader and speaker, is the widely read author of several books, including Listening for the Heartbeat of God, Praying with the Earth and A New Harmony: The Spirit, the Earth & the Human Soul. Formerly warden of Iona Abbey in the Western Isles of Scotland, he is now companion theologian for the American Spirituality Center of Casa del Sol at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico and the co-founder of Heartbeat: A Journey Towards Earth's Wellbeing. Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi, best known to English-speaking audiences as Rumi, is considered to be one of the greatest of Sufi poets. Born in 1207 in Balkh (now Afghanistan), Rumi was a teacher, theologian, and philosopher, as well as a mystic poet, whose influence spread throughout Afghanistan and central Asia,Turkey, and India. His most significant work is the Mathnawi, a multivolume work of stories and lyric poetry on teaching and Sufi lore. He also brought us the Mawlawiya (Mevlevi), a Sufi order that engages dance in its spiritual practices and that is better known in the West as the Whirling Dervishes. Born in 1819 in Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman was a poet, essayist, and journalist best known for Leaves of Grass (first published in 1855) and the poems "Song of Myself " and "I Sing the Body Electric." In the early years of the Civil War, Whitman traveled to Washington, D.C., to search for his brother,who was reported missing in action. Whitman stayed in Washington and volunteered as an aide in the hospitals, tending to sick and wounded soldiers. One of the first American poets to gain international attention, Whitman died in 1862 in Camden, New Jersey. Show Less