Saints: Faith without Borders

Edited by Françoise Meltzer and Jaś Elsner

Now in print and available for purchase!

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 Jaś 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, Saintstakes 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.

Contents

Introduction  by Françoise Meltzer and Jaś Elsner

From Cuba with Saints  by Marc Blanchard

St. Elvis  by Lawrence Jasud

Reviving the Fairy Tree: Tales of European Sanctity  by Françoise Meltzer

Transgressing the Self: Making Charismatic Saints  by Simon Coleman

On Naming Saints  by David Tracy

Patron Saint of the Incongruous: Rabbi Me'ir, the Talmud, and Menippean Satire  by Daniel Boyarin

Thinking with Saints: Sanctity and Society in the Early Modern World  by Simon Ditchfield

St. Dymphna and the Lunatics: The Advent of Moral Community Psychiatry  by Bernard Rubin

On the Politics of Sainthood: Resistance and Mimicry in Postcolonial Morocco  by Malika Zeghal

The Enchantment of Judaism: Israeli Anxieties and Puzzles  by Aviad Kleinberg

Persuading the Absent Saint: Image and Performance in Marian Devotion  by Robert Maniura

Miracles of Bodily Transformation, or How St. Francis Received the Stigmata  by Arnold I. Davidson

Re-Presenting a Contemporary Saint: Padre Pio of Pietrelcina  by Michael A. Di Giovine

Saint Teresa of Avila  by Julia Kristeva , translated by Anne Marsella

‘Lycidas’: A Wolf in Saint’s Clothing  by Neil Forsyth

The Invisibility of the Saint by Jean-Luc Marion

Beyond Compare: Pagan Saint and Christian God in Late Antiquity  by Jaś Elsner

Apophthegmata  by Aviad Kleinberg

For more CI Books, click here.

Jaś Elsner and Françoise Meltzer
Saints: Faith without Borders, edited by Françoise Meltzer and Jaś Elsner.