Saints As They Really Are: Voices of Holiness in Our Time
by Michael Plekon
Dorothy Day, the political writer, activist, and cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement wrote: “We have seldom been given the saints as they really were, as they affected the lives of their times—unless it is in their own writings. But instead of that strong meat we are too generally given the pap of hagiography. Too little has been stressed the idea that all are called.”
In Saints As They Really Are, the third book in his critically-acclaimed series on saints and holiness, Michael Plekon amplifies on Day’s statement: “I wanted to see what holiness looks like in contemporary lives by listening to voices of those seeking to live such a life in our time. But rather than pursue themes and values in the abstract, I have chosen instead to go to individuals, to listen to writers and what they have said about their efforts to find God.”
Plekon draws on the autobiographical work of Peter Berger, Dorothy Day, Kathleen Norris, Patricia Hempl, Barbara Brown Taylor, Nora Gallagher, Sara Miles, Sergius Bulgakov, Andrew Brivak, Lauren Winner, Thomas Merton, Darcey Steinke, and Diana Butler Bass, among others, so that we can listen to writers from diverse church backgrounds reflect on their search for God and efforts to lead a holy life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He offers a strong argument that our failings and weaknesses are not disqualifications to holiness. As Jim Forest (All is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day) comments, “Actual saints, Michael Plekon reminds us, don’t come with ready-made halos. They struggle and fail just as we do, endure bitter disappointments, and are at times nailed to the cross by the church itself . . . Even so, saints—few of them formally canonized—continue to arise, partly thanks to the church, partly despite it. Plekon’s book challenges the reader’s very idea of sanctity.”
Michael Plekon is a professor in the department of sociology/anthropology and the Program in Religion and Culture at Baruch College, City University of New York, and an ordained priest in the Orthodox Church in America. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Hidden Holiness and Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church, both also published by the University of Notre Dame Press.
Saints As They Really Are: Voices of Holiness in Our Time
Michael Plekon
ISBN: 978-0-268-03838-0 / paperback edition 2012, $30.00
304 pages
ISBN: 978-0-268-08982-5 / Ebook Perpetual Ownership, $21.00;
Ebook 30-day Ownership, $7.00
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