Different Kind of Cell: The Story of a Murderer Who Became a Monk

Description: The gripping story of one man's remarkable spiritual journey

A "most dangerous" criminal, convicted of five violent murders, Clayton Anthony Fountain was condemned in 1974 to live out his days in solitary confinement at the highest-security prison in the U.S. Without ever again emerging from his cell, however, Fountain underwent a profound spiritual transformation. Father W. Paul Jones, who served as Fountain's spiritual adviser for six years until Fountain's sudden death in 2004, shares his amazing story with candor and compassion in these pages.

Brief description: W. Paul Jones is a Roman Catholic priest, a Trappist brother at Assumption Abbey in the Ozarks, and founding spiritual director of the Hermitage Spiritual Retreat Center, Pittsburg, Missouri. His other books include The Art of Spiritual Direction

Review Quotes: 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 Scott
Gethsemani 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)