Saints: Faith without Borders (A Critical Inquiry Book) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226519929 ISBN 13: 9780226519920

Publisher: University of Chicago Press Journals, 2011

Synopsis

While the modern world has largely dismissed the figure of the saint as a throwback, we remain fascinated by excess, marginality, transgression, and porous subjectivity—categories that define the saint. In this collection, Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner bring together top scholars from across the humanities to reconsider our denial of saintliness and examine how modernity returns to the lure of saintly grace, energy, and charisma.

Addressing such problems as how saints are made, the use of saints by political and secular orders, and how holiness is personified, Saints takes us on a photo tour of Graceland and the cult of Elvis and explores the changing political takes on Joan of Arc in France. It shows us the self-fashioning of culture through the reevaluation of saints in late-antique Judaism and Counter-Reformation Rome, and it questions the political intent of underlying claims to spiritual attainment of a Muslim sheikh in Morocco and of Sephardism in Israel. Populated with the likes of Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, and Padre Pio, this book is a fascinating inquiry into the status of saints in the modern world.

About this title

About the Author

Françoise Meltzer is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, where she is also professor at the Divinity School and in the College, and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. Meltzer is the author of five books, most recently of Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity, and a coeditor of the journal Critical Inquiry. Jas Elsner is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, and visiting professor of art history at the University of Chicago. Elsner’s most recent solo-authored book is Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text.

Review

“Overall, the collected contributions in Saints: Faith without Borders showcase both the wide range of approaches that can be brought to bear on the ‘saint’ and the myriad of circumstances where sainthood and sanctity occur. This volume provides a welcome opportunity to take the term ‘saint’ on the broadest possible level. Saints: Faith without Borders is an intellectual experiment that results in a delightful conflux of theory and application, yesterday and today, saints and sanctity.”
(Reviews in Religion & Theology)

“Saints deserves attention, not only on account of the sophisticated content of most of the essays but also on account of the structure of the volume itself which provocatively defies scholarly convention by its ‘inorganicism, the very indecorousness and jangling’ together of incongruous elements.” (Church History)

“This intelligently edited, consistently engaging volume collects eighteen essays from scholars in a variety of fields―theology, history of religions, philosophy, art history, comparative literature, etc.―dealing with saints and sainthood in their multifarious forms. . . . This volume is highly recommended not only for those interested in the category of the saint but also for scholars investigating the fraught relationship between religion and modernity.”
(Religious Studies Review)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press Journals
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0226519929
• ISBN 13: 9780226519920
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 409
• Editor: Meltzer Françoise, Elsner Jas