The Order of Preachers, the Dominicans, celebrate the 800th anniversary of their founding in 2016. This book revisits the life of Dominic in light of the most recent historical research. At the same time it attempts to bring the saint of life, not in a hagiographical way but as someone who has contemporary appeal. Dominic was a man of real flesh and blood, with real challenges and struggles. Portraits of him can only approximate who he was, but he comes through to today’s world as an itinerant contemplative for whom preaching was a passion and his first love, someone responsive to the ways in which providence worked in his life.
There are many unanswered questions in the life of Dominic and many that will always remain unanswered. The closerm however, we sift through the sources, the more we see a man who was a servant of God but also a servant of preaching. He liked to style himself as the humble servant of preaching. And with preaching being in the forefront of concerns int he life if the church, Saint Dominic is truly a saint for our times.