Monica's Thirty-Year Vigil

In the fourth century, a North African mother named Monica watched her brilliant son Augustine abandon everything she had taught him. He took a concubine at seventeen, fathered a child out of wedlock, and embraced the Manichaean heresy — a belief system that contradicted every prayer she had whispered over his cradle in Thagaste. Monica followed him. When Augustine secretly boarded a ship for Rome to escape her influence, she pursued him across the Mediterranean.…