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Popular historian and award-winning author Jon M. Sweeney relates the untold story of St. Francis‰Ûªs friendship with Elias of Cortona, the man who helped him build the Franciscan movement. Sweeney uses the complexities of their relationship in a gripping narrative of how their efforts changed the world and how Elias‰Ûªs enthusiasm betrayed the ideals of his friend.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‰Ûªs ideals.
Blending history and biography, Sweeney reveals how Francis and Elias rebuilt churches, aided lepers, and entertained as ‰ÛÏGod‰Ûªs troubadours‰Û 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 ‰ÛÏthe devil‰Û to many of the other friars; they believed him to be a traitor to their ideals. After Francis‰Ûªs 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‰Ûªs undoing was rooted in his attempts to honor his old friend.
Features & Benefits
Sweeney‰Ûªs twenty books have combined sales of more than 225,000 copies.
Sweeney writes for America and other periodicals and has appeared on Fox News, CBS News in Chicago, CBS Saturday Morning, WGN-TV, WTTW on Chicago‰Ûªs Chicago Tonight, and PBS television, as well as a wide variety of radio programs.
In 2015, Sweeney received a second-place award for history books from the Catholic Press Association for When Saint Francis Saved the Church.
