The Dignity of Grace - A Life of Sister Thomas Welder

by Larry Woiwode

In The Dignity of Grace, Larry Woiwode recounts the remarkable life of Sister Thomas Welder, Benedictine Sister of Annunciation Monastery and the fifth president of the University of Mary. A towering figure to North Dakotans, Sister Thomas was first Diane, a girl in whom the trace of her future influence was evident from the beginning—in her capacity for endurance amid suffering, her ease of affection and attention, her trademark magnanimity joined to her humility. Entering Annunciation Monastery in 1959 and professing her monastic vows in 1961, the life of Sister Thomas was soon entangled in the drama of the newly established Mary College, from its uncertain beginnings to its dynamic growth into America’s Leadership University. First choir director, then chair of the Humanities Division, then president for over three decades, the University of Mary’s story—and Sister Thomas’, too—can both be summed up in a phrase that marks each to the to lead is to serve, to serve God, and to serve one another. On her passing in June of 2020, the University of Mary remembers that Sister Thomas’s was a life that resounded with the truth that, even today, runs all through the striving and dreaming on its windswept prairie bluff – everything is grace.

Hardcover

Published April 12, 2021

About the author

Larry Woiwode was designated Poet Laureate of North Dakota by the Legislative Assembly in 1995. He served as Writer in Residence at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1973-74; and from 1983-88 was a tenured professor at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and director of its Creative Writing Program.

Larry Woiwode’s fiction has appeared in Antaeus, Antioch Review, Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Harpers, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Partisan Review, and many other publications; his poetry has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Poetry North, Tar River Poetry, Transatlantic Review, Works in Progress, and other publications and venues, including broadsides and anthologies.

His novels and his memoirs are widely acclaimed and his writings have been translated into a dozen languages and earned him international recognition: he is the recipient of the William Faulkner Foundation Award, 1969; has been a Guggenheim Fellow, 1971-72; a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, 1975; chosen by the American Association of Publishers for a novel to present to the White House Library, 1976; is recipient of an Award in Literature from the National Institute and American Academy of Arts & Letters, 1980; of the John Dos Passos Prize (for a diverse body of work), 1991; and of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, 2001. He has also received North Dakota’s highest honor, the Theodore Roosevelt Roughrider Award, conferred by Governor Sinner, in 1992; and in 2011 received the Emeritus Award from the High Plains Awards Committee, for “A Body of Work as Vast as the West.” His recent publications include Words Made Fresh, and The Invention of Lefse, published in 2011 by Crossway Books. His new novel Blackburn Bay is nearly ready to be viewed by agents and publishers, and in 2010 he completed a new book of short stories