This masterful volume of more than sixty reflections may be read piecemeal or from cover to cover. Messori’s extensive research forms a lively and colorful mosaic: dogma is united to enthralling anecdotes, biblical exegesis to apparitions, spirituality to little-known histories, theology to mystery. Here you will find scholars, literary figures, visionaries, pilgrims, and the miraculously healed — saints and sinners, inquisitors and heretics, emperors and peasants, all intertwined.

Messori offers a sometimes-shocking series of investigations into what can be a secret world that he encounters as a declared devotee, although allergic to the syrupy rhetoric of a certain devotionalism. His pages are both rigorous and instructive in evaluating arguments and controversies, reflecting the vivacity and clarity of a great journalist and relentless scholar.