There’s a particular kind of nervousness that comes with finally telling people something you’ve been carrying privately for years.
For many years, I’ve been living inside a story that isn’t mine, even though somehow it became mine too. I want to share it with you today, because on September 1st, that story becomes a real, physical book you can hold in your hands.
It’s called Radical Love: The Revolutionary Spirituality of Francis of Assisi.
Why I Wrote This Book
I didn’t set out to write a book about a thirteenth-century Italian saint. I set out to understand something that had been quietly reshaping my own life for years — a transformative encounter I experienced at thirty years old that I still don’t have complete language for, even now. It broke open everything I thought I understood about God, about love, about what a life could actually be organized around.
That encounter sent me looking. Into contemplative practice, seriously, for the first time in my life. Into monasteries in India and Nepal, sitting with teachers in traditions that weren’t originally my own. And eventually, unexpectedly, to the tomb of Francis of Assisi — where I discovered that his story, eight hundred years earlier, was in many ways a version of my own.
A young man who had everything the world told him should be enough. Who discovered it wasn’t. Who encountered something that broke every category he had for understanding his life, and spent the rest of his days walking toward it with everything he had.
I think most of us know that ache, in whatever form it’s taken for us. The sense that life looks fine from the outside and feels emptier than it should on the inside. Francis felt it too, eight centuries before either of us was born. And what he found on the other side of it is what this book is trying to bring back into the world.
Recovering the Francis We Actually Need
If you know Francis of Assisi at all, you probably know the gentle version. The garden statue. The birds on the shoulder. Safe, sentimental, easy to admire from a comfortable distance.
That’s not who I found when I actually went looking.
The real Francis stripped himself naked in a public square to renounce his father’s fortune. He kissed a leper while he was trembling with disgust. He walked, completely unarmed, into the tent of the Sultan of Egypt during the Crusades — because he believed love could cross a line that hatred had drawn. He was called pazzo, madman, by the very people who had once celebrated him.
That man built one of the greatest spiritual movements in human history. And I don’t think we’ve done him — or ourselves — any favors by sanding down every rough, radical edge of who he actually was.
Radical Love is my attempt to recover him. Not to admire from a distance, but to actually learn to live the way he lived.
What’s Inside
The book is built around eleven principles, drawn directly from Francis’s life and tested across my own decades of contemplative practice. Each chapter pairs his teaching with practical application, guided meditation, and prayer — so this isn’t a book meant to be read once and set on a shelf. It’s meant to be lived with, slowly, over time.
Inside, you’ll find real, usable guidance for:
- Living simply in a culture built on excess
- Finding joy that doesn’t rise and fall with your circumstances
- Facing fear with the steadiness that only genuine spiritual practice can give
- Releasing the exhausting need for other people’s approval
- Seeing the sacred in everyone — including the people you find hardest to love
- Moving through grief, guilt, and shame into the freedom that grace makes possible
- Building a life organized entirely around a love that costs something and gives back everything
A Timely Arrival
Radical Love releases on September 1st, 2026 — just over a month before the 800th anniversary of Francis’s death on October 4th, 2026. This year is being observed as a Jubilee Year for Francis across the Franciscan world: a designated season of pilgrimage, renewal, and return to what actually matters. I wanted this book to be part of that season, and part of the conversation it’s already stirring.
I’ll be traveling to Assisi myself this fall, walking the actual ground where his story unfolded, and I can’t wait to share that journey with all of you here on the blog and across social media in the weeks ahead.
Join Me
If you’re tired of spirituality that asks nothing of you and changes nothing in you, I wrote this book for exactly that hunger. Not admiration for a man who lived eight centuries ago. An invitation to become the kind of person he was — steady, courageous, and genuinely, radically free to love.
Radical Love: The Revolutionary Spirituality of Francis of Assisi releases everywhere books are sold on September 1st, 2026.
Thank you for walking this road with me — through every sound bath meditation, through our Scripture & Spirit Bible Community, through every meditation and every conversation we’ve shared along the way. This book carries all of that with it. I hope it meets you exactly where you are.
With love,
Anthony
