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A Measure of Greatness

The papacy of John Paul II: two assessments

Susan A. Ross | Robert Louis Wilken

        Robert Louis Wilken   On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the election of John Paul II as pope, I am reminded of the words of Stephen Spender’s poem, “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great.” In it Spender speaks of those “Whose lovely ambition / Was that their lips, still touched with fire, / Should tell of the Spirit, clothe (...)


 

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about the writer

Susan A. Ross is associate professor of theology at Loyola University Chicago. Her most recent book is Extravagant Affections: A Feminist Sacramental Theology (Continuum).

about the writer

Robert Louis Wilken, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, is the author of The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (Yale University Press), and Remembering the Christian Past (Eerdmans).

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