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The Italian mystic Caterina di Benincasa was born in humble circumstances in Siena, Italy, in 1347. Early in life, visionary experiences led her to take a vow of virginity. Around 1364/65 she became a Dominican tertiary. She received a spiritual education and became the center of a circle comprising both religious and laity. Highly cultured Tuscan men and women supported Catherine, who was unskilled in writing and who, in 1370, began expressing her “political” thinking. In light of her experiences, she offered insightful criticism of the monastic life. After an invitation to see th…

Blaise Pascal (1623–62), a French mathematician, physicist, and lay theologian, was from a well-to-do family in Auvergne and spent most of his life in Paris. At the age of 16 he completed a well-respected treatise on conic sections, and in 1642 he invented a digital calculator. His father introduced him to the so-called Académie Mersenne, the circle around the Cartesian abbot Martin Mersenne. Pascal first came into contact with Jansenists in Rouen between 1639 and 1647, and in 1647 he met René D…