I had seen James Heisig, creator of the famous kanji-memorization technique, referred to a few times on the web with 'Fr' before his name, and a bit of digging confirms that he is indeed a Catholic priest, ordained in 1969 if this document is anything to go by, and a member of the Divine Word Missionaries (hence the SVD that sometimes appears after his name). Given that the Heisig technique is one of the most-discussed learning methods for the Japanese language, it's odd that I've gone a few years mucking around with the language before discovering this rather basic biographical fact about the man.
On my to-read list at the moment is Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett, the story of the encounter between the author (a missionary) and the Pirahã, an Amazonian people with a language and worldview that have been argued about a hell of a lot over the years. (See the tilde over the 'a' at the end there? I went to the effort of finding out the Unicode point for a combining tilde, just to get the tribe's name right. Don't say I never give you anything.)
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