Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
When I told a lapsed friend several years ago that I’d published a book about St. Thérèse of Lisieux, she rather pointedly inquired, “But you don’t have to be inside the Church to be a saint, do you?”
I understood her concern; one of my abiding obsessions is the “unsung saint”: the person who is never noticed.
In fact, I write a monthly column for Magnificat Magazine called Credible Witnesses that celebrates a notable Catholic who has died but has not yet, and may never be, canonized. But here’s why saints are compelling: Saints are exceptional. Saints are extreme. As William James observed in “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, $7.85): “There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric … It would profit us little to study this second-hand [i.e. conventional, ordinary] religious life. We must make search rather for … individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather.”
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.
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