Can something be beastly and beautiful? St. Anselm, the 12th-century archbishop of Canterbury, is famous—and now often ridiculed—for his theory that Christ had to die to restore a debt we owed to God.
On a cold December morning in 1832, a New England farmer named John Durfee found the corpse of a young woman hanging from a stack pole on his farm. She was Sarah Maria Cornell, a 29-year-old mill ...