A religious figure and educator in the early nineteenth century and the first native-born American saint, Elizabeth Ann Seton founded the Sisters of Charity and established several schools that provided religious and secular education to wealthy and poor children alike. Her private struggles and her public work are recorded in detail in the many letters and several journals she wrote throughout her life. Sent to private schools as a young girl, she was carefully tutored at home beyond the custom of her contemporaries, and she was well versed in French and English literature, contemporary philosophies, and the natural sciences, especially in medicine. Her youthful thinking was influenced somewhat by the writings of Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but the greatest influence on her thought was the enthusiastic yet intellectual Protestant Episcopal spirituality prevalent in her social class during the late eighteenth century in America. The love of personal Bible...