A Different Kind of Cell: The Story of a Murderer Who Became a Monk
Clayton Fountain was regarded as a ruthless killer beyond anyone's power to save. Yet in the stillness of his solitary confinement — entombed alive in a cell of concrete and steel — God was at work redeeming and remaking Clayton Fountain. I am grateful to Father Paul for ministering so compassionately to a man precious only to God — and for sharing his remarkable story with the world.— Martin Sheen"Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century once liberated a murderer being led to execution. 'I will kill him myself,' Bernard promised; he took the man to Clairvaux and made him a monk. Bernard meant that through the process of monastic conversion the man's false self, which had expressed itself in violence, would die and his true self emerge and thrive in peace. W. Paul Jones tells a twentieth-century version of that story. Through Jones's sensitive, gripping prose the reader follows the conversion of Clayton A. Fountain from chaos to clarity."— Fr. Mark ScottGethsemani Abbey, Kentucky"No one is beyond the mercy of God. No one. The message of this book is that to kill anyone on the assumption that their redemption is impossible is to take the place of God."— Sr. Helen Prejean (from foreword)