“Afterlives of the Saints”

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

JEROME, PATRON SAINT OF ASCETIC LIBRARIANS. Paula, patron saint of widows, the voiceless, and the codependent. Lawrence, patron saint of students and barbecues. Anthony, patron saint of masturbators, epileptics, and tortured French realists.

Colin Dickey’s Afterlives of Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith offers what to most of us will be an unfamiliar (and thus seductive) litany. These are not the standard, well-behaved saints, the Johns, Jameses, and Josephs. They are instead, as Dickey notes, the miscreants: “saints who murder, saints who [gouge] out their own eyes and hold them out for inspection, saints who minister to the petty and the bizarre and the maligned.” Dickey’s saints are petulant in their pursuit of spiritual perfection. They steal away, sequester themselves, or expose their suffering for all to see. They are excessive, indecorous, mad, and mostly unable to live in the world. They are, for better or worse, a lot like us.

Salon.com > Lindsay Reckson

“Afterlives of the Saints”