Saints

Review: Down the Valley

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Cover image of "Down the Valley" by Edith M. Humphrey

Down the Valley, Edith M. Humphrey. Cascade Books (ISBN: 9781666772067), 2024.

Summary: Further adventures beyond the gate of the white fence where the children at “Gramgon’s” house and an older friend meet the saints after whom they are named.

In Beyond the White Fence, we are introduced to “Gramgon” and the extended family who come to visit her capacious Pittsburgh home. In that story, the children explored beyond the white fence, bordering Gramgon’s property, encountering fauns, who led them on adventures to other times where they met the saints after whom they were named, and then were escorted back by a peacock, a kind of guide and protector. On one adventure, they pick up a peacock feather, which they conceal under a rock by the gate, and take on future adventures, considering it a connection that will ensure them getting home.

Well, in this story, there are more children who have not yet encountered their saints (and lots more saints to be encountered). And there is an older neighbor boy who has been drawn to this family, but who wonders whether he is too old to meet a saint, even were he to believe. His name, fittingly is Thomas (nicknamed TJ), and he feels himself always late to the party.

Three of the boys, James, Kevin, and Isaiah are especially close, and try to keep their secrets from the girls. They call themselves “the Three Musketeers” and in the course of the book, each has an encounter with the saint for whom he is named. James, interestingly meets the Apostle James as he was finishing his letter and enlists James to carry a copy to the Apostle Paul–an interesting idea. Both James and Paul were in Jerusalem and the boys witness Paul’s close run escape from those seeking his life. Later, on his own, Isaiah encounters Isaiah the prophet just after his temple vision of God. Later Kevin meets the Irish saint, who dwells in caves and has a special bond with the animals.

Perhaps the centerpiece story belongs to young Allie, one of the younger cousins. She had been recently adopted and didn’t quite fit with the older girls, and wondered what was so interesting to her boy cousins down in the valley beyond the gate. Then she sees the bucks in the meadow and follows, but fails to take the feather. She awakens in a temple of Apollo, just when a servant, George is brought from prison and challenged to recant his faith in Christ and worship Apollo. George stands firm before Diocletian and even rebukes the demon inhabiting the statue of Apollo. Then the Empress Alexandra asks George’s God to save her and publicly repudiates her husband Diocletian’s gods. declaring “the true God is Christ.” Allie witnesses the courageous faith of George and Alexandra not only here but in the dungeon where they await execution. Allie was swept up with those arrested. Meanwhile, Naomi, Rachie, and Kevin realize Allie is missing and hadn’t taken the feather. The bucks are waiting, and we wonder how they will rescue Allie and get back.

The last adventure belongs to TJ, who with the Three Musketeers ends up in Kerala with the Apostle Thomas who he discovers has also been late to a few parties and also has struggled to believe.. The encounter, along with the embodied faith of Gramgon’s family is working on his heart and mind.

Interludes between adventures offer time not only for food and the family circle, awaiting the news of a birth. It affords time with Gramgon’s books, who like Edith Humphrey, is a seminary professor. They research the saints, and this along with the encounters, serves to tell the stories of each saint.

There was, at least for me, no discernible plot, unless it be TJ’s journey to faith. Gramgon’s valley provides the framing device for this series of encounters between the children and their saints. What we have is a great collection of adventure stories by which the children and readers learn both about the saints, and the God and Savior they trusted. And for grade school children (and maybe the parents reading aloud) this is perfect.

I’m left wondering if there are more adventures at Gramgon’s in the offing. There are more cousins, and certainly more saints. I for one will be on the lookout, even if I lack a peacock feather!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

My review of Beyond the White Fence may be accessed at: https://bobonbooks.com/2021/12/03/review-beyond-the-white-fence/

Review: Saint Valentine the Kindhearted

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Saint Valentine the Kindhearted, Ned Bustard (text and illustrations). Downers Grove: IVP Kids, 2024.

Summary: A retelling in verse and woodcut illustrations of the story of Saint Valentine, centered on not only his kindheartedness, but that there is more to love than romance.

Roses are red, violets are blue,
sugar is sweet, and so are you.
This is the poem many share
to show how much they love and care.
Flowers and candy sent our way
ev'ry year on Valentine's Day.
But why the cards that say, "Be mine"?
That's all from dear Saint Valentine!

      --Ned Bustard

Ned Bustard opens this latest book in his series of children’s books with IVP Kids with this rhyme, familiar to all of us who went through Valentine’s Day card exchanges in primary grades and the giving of flowers and candy (and perhaps a romantic dinner!) with that special someone. With that day coming up in a couple weeks (also Ash Wednesday in 2024, an interesting juxtaposition!), this book for children and grownups explores the life of this saint. Bustard follows the format of the other two books in this series, Saint Nicholas, the Giftgiver and Saint Patrick, the Forgiver, alternating his hand-carved woodcuts on the lefthand page with verse on the righthand page.

Bustard reminds us in an afterword that relatively little is known of Saint Valentine apart from his ministry of preaching, healing, and caring for the poor when Christians resisted the pressure to worship the gods of the Roman empire. The story centers around one the legends about Valentine. Haled before a judge for marrying Roman soldiers, supposedly weakening their resolve to fight, he is challenged to show the judge that Christ is true by healing the judge’s blind daughter. Valentine prays for her and she is healed. In response, the judge destroys his household statues of his gods, and is baptized along with forty others of his household.

Image from publisher’s webpage for Saint Valentine the Kindhearted.

We also learn the story of “valentines.” Valentine was later summoned before the emperor where he boldly testified to Christ. Thrown into prison, he wrote short notes of encouragement and affection to all his friends, tying each with twine, signing them “from your Valentine.” Apparently one of these was written on the day of his martyrdom, February 14, to the girl whose sight he restored (his execution and martyrdom is only alluded to here as when “his time came to an end” with the girl receiving notes from him).

Each of the books focuses on one quality, in this case the kindheartedness of Valentine. The book also expands our notion of the love we celebrate beyond romantic love. Bustard depicts the natural love of family, parents for children, the love of friends, and pure, unconditional love. If you note closely on the cover and in the text, there are four different colors of hearts, representing these four loves.

There is so much within 32 pages, not only about kindness and love but the unflinching courage of this saint in testifying to the saving work of the risen Lord Jesus, refusing to bow the knee to the Roman gods, for which he died.

For those who regard Valentine’s Day as sappy or simply a celebration of romantic (and in our culture, highly sexualized) love, this story invites us to recapture the deeper story of the saint after whom it is named, the depth and breadth of love expressed in his story, and his courageous martyrdom, his death for the One he loved. In this year when February 14 is both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday, reading this book enriches and makes sense of how we can give ourselves in love while always being ready to die for what we love. Read and share this book with those you love!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Reviews of previous books in this series

Saint Nicholas the Giftgiver

Saint Patrick the Forgiver

Review: Beyond the White Fence

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Beyond the White Fence, Edith M. Humphrey. Chesterton, IN: Ancient Faith Publishing, 2021.

Summary: A group of cousins visiting “Gramgon” and a neighbor boy have a series of adventures in which they meet their patron saints, passing through a portal just beyond the garden gate.

It all began with the fawns. Katie, visiting her “Gramgon,” spots them beyond the garden gate at the bottom of the yard. She’s been told not to go into the valley beyond, but is almost irresistibly drawn to them and passes through the gate. There are other animals including turkeys…and a peacock. She follows and discovers she is in a different time and place. She encounters Lady Edith of Wilton, the sister of King Edgar, who has chosen the life of a religious sister. While there, Edith brother is killed, and the neighbor boy, TJ, who had followed narrowly foils an attempt on Edith’s life before the two are led by the peacock to where they can see the garden gate. Katie carries and hides a feather of the peacock.

Subsequent adventures follow as cousins from Pittsburgh join Katie, who is from Kansas. Together or separately, each of the girls sees the fawns and are transported to an encounter with their patron saints — Rachel, Jacob’s betrothed, Ruth and Naomi, Mary Magdalene. Sometimes they simply learn of the faith of these saints, and sometimes there is adventure, for example, rescuing Rachel from kidnappers who would prevent her marriage to Jacob. The end of the visit to Gramgon is coming but Katie has not met her patron saint Katherine yet. Edith is the saint of the author of this work, and presumably Gramgon. One more time they are bidden beyond the garden gate, this time by chimes, only to witness Katherine’s courageous witness before her martyrdom, and glimpse the glory beyond that Katherine would enter.

They carry the peacock feather on each venture, and when the peacock appears, it is time to depart and the way back to their own time is open–and no time has elapsed. The situations they enter are dangerous and the peacock feather and the peacock represent the eyes of the Lord upon them, protecting and guiding.

This Narnia-like story is about the discovery of the saints, our communion with believers who have preceded us, whose lives may instruct us in living the life of faith. I do wonder a bit with Gramgon’s prohibition of these ventures, the whisperings of the children she overhears, and her unconfirmed suspicions. It makes me wonder if Gramgon herself has traveled beyond the gate. Does she realize that the children can only go if bidden? Does she even “cover” for the children when they are weary from ventures?

This is a delightful story, particularly as the cousins become more interested in the backstory of these saints for whom they are named. The climactic adventure, witnessing the martyrdom, is beautifully written, and to be savored.

This story reminded me of a wonderful experience a few years back when I was invited to be present as a friend was baptized and received into the Roman Catholic Church during the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday. Part of the liturgy includes the Litany of the Saints in which we work through a list beginning with the Holy Trinity, Mary, the angels, patriarchs and prophets, apostles and evangelists, the disciples, the innocents, martyrs, the holy bishops and confessors, the doctors of the church, and many more, interspersed with a long list of names in each category.

With each group or saint, we bid, “pray for us.” It is prayed slowly and meditatively and takes a long time. After all, this is part of a vigil on the eve of Easter. I sat in wonder as I heard this “great cloud of witnesses” enumerated and the vision of our solidarity as we run the same race, fight the same battles that millennia of believers before us ran and fought, and now pray for us. It seemed a “thin place” where the veil between us was barely there and we were present to one another. I knew the stories of some, and wondered about those of many others.

There is something in this for all of us–children and “Gramgons” alike. Stories like this one invite us into the literature of the saints, the stories of all those who have gone faithfully before us until whatever end God had for them. It explains the attraction of the stories of martyrs. They remind us of our communion with them, the mysterious fellowship we enjoy, and that we may well be prayed for not merely by our living friends but by many in glory who are heard by the Father who watches over our ways.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Companions in the Darkness

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Companions in the Darkness, Diana Gruver (Foreword by Chuck DeGroat). Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2020.

Summary: Biographies of seven Christians in history who experienced depression and the hope we can embrace from how they lived through their struggle.

Martin Luther, Charles Spurgeon, David Brainerd, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King, Jr. What these and two others in this book have in common is their struggles with depression. Diana Gruver, who has also experienced depression, has studied the lives of seven saints for what may be learned from their experience of depression. She writes:

Their stories bring me comfort, reassuring me that I am not alone. They remind me that I am not the only one to walk this road, that this experience is not an alien one. The lie that “surely no one else has felt this” is cut down by the truth that others, in fact, have, and their presence makes me feel less isolated. These fellow travelers are my companions in the darkness of night.

Diana Gruver, p. 13.

Gruver gracefully narrates the stories of these saints, weaving in insights from her own struggles with depression. One of the striking things I noticed was the differences in these stories and that depression had many faces. Some seemed to have family proclivities toward depression, others like Charles Spurgeon first encountered depression more or less out of the blue, resulting from a tragic event. Some like David Brainerd struggled with concurrent health issues while others faced pressures from tremendously challenging events.

One of the most interesting stories will probably be an unknown to most of us, Hannah Allen. Having struggled with depression during her husband’s absences at sea, she sinks into a deeper depression when he dies at sea. At one point she secrets herself under the floorboards where she is staying, determined to starve herself to death. With the help of relatives, she eventually agreed to medical treatment, improving to the point where she re-married. Gruver discusses how prayer and reasoning from scripture were not enough:

The cure for Hannah Allen wasn’t to drag her to church. It wasn’t to convince her to pray more. It wasn’t to quote Scripture at her until it removed her despair. Her caretakers sought for her the best medical care of the day. They changed her surroundings. They put her on what we would now call suicide watch. They kept showing up with compassion. They attended to her soul, yes, but they also attended to her body.

Diane Gruver, p. 47.

Hannah left a spiritual memoir of her life, which is the primary way we know of her struggle. She represents the many “ordinary Christians” who anonymously struggle, and the hope there is for them.

Gruver not only candidly describes the struggles of each figure she profiles, she shows the efforts employed by each, all but Martin Luther King, Jr., before modern medical treatments. King had been recommended for psychiatric treatment for depression by a doctor but refused because of the efforts to discredit him and the stigma mental illness incurred in his time. Luther fled solitude, married, and enjoyed drink and laughter at the table. William Cowper, who gave us great hymns and struggled through his life with depression, found respite in art and friendship. Mother Teresa, who once experienced a clear call of God lived in spiritual darkness where God was utterly absent and chose continued obedience to Jesus despite her feelings. King drew on reservoirs of humor, song, and prayer, the spirituality of the Black church, to lead resiliently under a continuous cloud of threats on his life, and during the desertion of friends when he stood against the Vietnam War.

Gruver includes an appendix with practical guidelines for helping a friend through depression. She sums up the message of this book, drawn from Pilgrim’s Progress as Christian and Hopeful cross the River of Death, as “the water is deep, but the bottom is good.” Depression is hard but God has not abandoned us, even if it feels that way.

We’re in especially dark times. One public health study reports that the incidence of symptoms associated with depression have more than tripled during the COVID pandemic. It’s likely that we, personally, or someone we care for, are one of these. Reading the stories of these “companions,” while not a substitute for professional care, may offer insight and hope to make it to the other side of these dark months. This book is a gift for our times as well as a glimpse of a side of people we thought we knew, enhancing our understanding of the quality of their faithfulness to God.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Vintage Saints and Sinners

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Vintage Saints and Sinners

Vintage Saints and Sinners, Karen Wright Marsh (foreword by Lauren Winner). Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2017.

Summary: Brief vignettes of the lives of twenty-five “saints” and how reflecting on them may inspire and challenge us.

It is one thing to be a Christian and another to understand how one might live well the Christian life. Certainly reading scripture is indispensable, both for precepts and examples. But throughout the history of the church, reading “the lives of the saints” has been found a valuable aid as we see fleshed out examples of the life of faith. This book is a contemporary contribution to that genre, giving us vignettes on the lives of twenty-five “saints” (not all are canonized as saints in the Roman Catholic Church) and the author’s reflections on what they teach her about the life of faith, and how they challenge her.

The book is organized into two parts around two key ideas in Jeremiah 6:16, asking and walking. Under “Asking” she writes about Soren Kierkegaard, Augustine, Therese of Lisieux, C. S. Lewis, Henri Nouwen, Flannery O’Connor, Martin Luther, Amanda Berry Smith, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A. W. Tozer, Mother Teresa, and Brother Lawrence. Under “Walking” she offers accounts of the lives of Thomas Merton, Benedict and Scholastica, Fannie Lou Hamer, John Wesley, Francis and Clare of Assisi, Dorothy Day, Howard Thurman, Julian of Norwich, Mary Paik Lee, Aelred of Rievaulx, Ignatius of Loyola, Juana Ines De La Cruz, and Sophie Scholl.

Each account typically runs seven to eight pages, making it ideal for one’s devotional reading. Marsh mixes biography and her own reflections about how learning about this saint speaks to her own experience. I particularly appreciated the lesser known figures she writes about, a number of them women. Reading the account of Sophie Scholl’s faith-inspired resistance to Nazism that resulted in her martyrdom raised the question of when is it right to risk one’s life in a righteous cause. Then there is the sharply contrasting picture of the Mexican Catholic sister Juana Ines De La Cruz who remains in her cloistered cell and writes beautiful poetry and philosophical theology to God’s glory and then renounced it for a life of contemplation and service. I’ve read much of Martin Luther King, but it was a delight to read of Howard Thurman, his mentor.

Lauren Winner, in her foreword, encourages noticing which saints we are drawn toward, and which saints trouble us. I’ll give you one of each from this collection.

I’ve found myself more and more drawn to the writings of Soren Kierkegaard as my life has gone on. Wright’s account of his reaction to the comfortable conformity of Danish Christianity appeals to me even as it challenges me. She writes, “Abandon your calculated safety for a reckless, wholehearted life of faith in Christ. Continue to become. Grow. Risk. Take that radical leap of faith right now.” I find myself drawn as one who has lived in that awkward tension of longing for comfort and yet knowing that it is in the risks of faith that life is its most intense and real.

Dorothy Day has been troubling me for the past couple months, as I’ve read a narrative of her life, as well as the shorter account here. At one point she has an abortion. When she converts, she leaves her marriage to follow Christ. She gets herself arrested numerous times, even at seventy-five. She employs her considerable writing talents on a penny newspaper, The Catholic Worker, and pours out her life serving the working poor. Marsh writes of her:

The human, more colorful Dorothy comes through in her confessional writings. Yes, she admits, it really is raving lunacy to give up your own bed, food, and hospitality to any old stranger in need. But that needy person hasn’t arrived to simply remind you of Christ. No, in “plain and simple and stupendous fact,” your guest is, quite literally, Jesus. The Bible shows how ordinary people like Lazarus, Mary, and Martha welcomed Jesus and so can you; there’s no excuse. Christ is all around you, meeting you in friends and outsiders. The glass of water you give to a beggar is given to him.

Dorothy insists that in the end we will be judged by our acts of mercy, so heaven hinges on the way we act toward Jesus in his frail, ordinary human form. So long as families still need bread, clothing, shelter, Dorothy says, “we must keep repeating these things. Eternal life begins now.” So don’t point to some distant dream of glowing redemption—let’s make life today look more like heaven. Get out there and make a difference in Jesus’ name.

Dorothy forces me to ask the uncomfortable question of whether there are times I’ve failed to recognize the Lord Jesus in a needy person seeking help.

One of the things one comes away with in this collection are that there are probably as many ways of “being a saint” as there are human beings. These people are so different from one another. If there is anything they have in common, it is simply to be captivated by the love of God and the person of Christ and what it means to live out this love in the days and years we are given. This is a book that both challenges and offers hope. Each of these people is indeed a saint and a sinner, both one responding to the call of God, and doing so out of the messiness of his or her life. In these pages, they beckon us to join them on the Way.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

 

For All the Saints

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All-SaintsThis weekend, the big deal seems to be Halloween. What seems crazy to me is that people spend as much on decorating for Halloween as for Christmas. For us, a carved pumpkin on the doorstep would do. What gets lost in this is a holiday that actually, at least for me, goes far more to the heart of my life. And this is All Saints Day. And this year, All Saints Day (November 1) falls on a Sunday, a time Christians around the world are gathered for worship.

All Saints Day, in some traditions celebrates those who have attained “the beatific vision” of heaven, and is distinguished from All Souls Day (the next day) remembering the faithful who have died and not yet attained heaven.

I understand that distinction but my read of things is that “saint” comes from the word “sanctus” which can mean “holy” or “set apart”. When Paul wrote letters to various churches, he invariably addressed them all as “saints”. That is because he understood all the faithful as having been “set apart” by God through Christ. It strikes me that those we have called “saints” have singularly lived into their set apart, holy identity, an identity all of us who believe share.

I don’t want to get into a religious argument here, but rather reflect on who I will be thinking of and celebrating this coming All Saints Day. For me, “all saints” includes:

  • my immediate family–my wife, my son and daughter-in-law–who probably earn the designation “saint” just by putting up with me!
  • the people gathered around me at my own place of worship, Smoky Row Brethren Church, a group of people I’ve kept company with for twenty-five years who have taught me as much about a lived faith as any group I know.
  • the amazing group of people I work with in the collegiate ministry I’m a part of including grad students, faculty, volunteers, team members and leadership–funny, intelligent, gifted, and tremendously thoughtful about being faithful to apply the whole of the Bible to the whole of life.
  • the mentors in my life who have passed–my parents, my grandmother Marie, Bob Mulholland, Mrs. King, Dick Kutan, and Sarah Gordon–people who prayed for me and through word and life introduced me to the faith.
  • the mentors in my life yet living–Doug, Sue, Barney, Kent, Terry, and Dave–who were gifts of God at various points in my journey teaching me what a well-lived life as a Christian looked like.
  • the saints who have shaped my life and captured my imagination through their writing, from Augustine to John Calvin to John Stott to Marilynne Robinson and Wendell Berry.
  • as a lover of music, I think of all the gifted composers from the earliest centuries through Bach to the present who gave us so much glorious music to play and sing that was written “soli Deo gloria” (to God’s glory alone).
  • then there is this universal, flawed and yet incredibly diverse community known as “the Church” that bridges all the fault lines of discord we humans create along lines of gender, ethnicity, class, economic status. Even in all of our differences expressed in denominations and diverse traditions there is this many-splendored Bride of Christ who will be revealed in all her beauty at the Last Day.
  • increasing I am grateful for the Church in the Majority World and Eastern Europe, for all its vitality and distinctive witness.

I could go on, but you might not go with me! In the Apostles Creed, we affirm “the communion of the saints”. The longer I go, the richer this phrase becomes to me as I think of my union with a community visible and invisible, living and at rest, stretching through the centuries and around the world.

Even if you do not share my faith but have read this far, this day reminds us of the basic truth that there is a community of people, living and dead, who have shaped each of our lives, hopefully for good. Beyond the macabre commercialism of Halloween, might there be something far better worth remembering and celebrating on the day we call All Saints Day?

Review: American Saint: The Life of Elizabeth Seton

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American Saint: The Life of Elizabeth Seton
American Saint: The Life of Elizabeth Seton by Joan Barthel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Elizabeth Ann Seton was the first native-born American citizen to be canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. Seton Hall University bears her name, having been founded by a nephew of hers, Bishop James Roosevelt Bayley of the Archdiocese of Newark.

Despite some structural problems, I found this a fascinating biography of this passionate, able, assertive, and devoted woman who within four years of her conversion to Roman Catholicism founded and served as the first leader of a women’s religious community.

First the structural problems. The first part of the book moves back and forth between the Setons last ditch attempt to save Will’s life through a trip to Italy, and the early years of Elizabeth Seton’s life leading up to this death. While illustrating her religious devotion and growing appreciation of Catholicism as explained by her Italian hosts (a business partner of Will’s). It ends up to me being a protracted death narrative. I would have favored covering this chronologically rather than the back and forth approach taken. The remainder of the book is chronological.

Aside from this, the biography gives us a good narrative of the formation of this saint–born into a well-to-do New York family, bereft of her mother at age three, daughter of a father who was a distinguished physician who died caring for patients in a yellow fever epidemic, married into a wealthy import-export merchant’s family whose fortunes decline after Will’s father dies. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s devotion continues to grow under the Episcopal rector John Henry Hobart’s direction. It is Hobart’s sermons that Elizabeth reads for solace as she desperately tries to care for Will in Italy as he is dying of tuberculosis.

Following Will’s death, she returns to the US and is received into St Peters Roman Catholic Church in New York in March of 1805 and confirmed by the first American Bishop, John Carroll in 1806. As an impoverished widow she struggles to survive and feed her children until invited to open a Catholic school for girls in Emmitsburg, Maryland in 1809. In July of that year, she forms the first American community of women religious dedicated to caring for the poor and the education of Catholic girls.

In the forming of this religious community what stands out is both what an able leader Seton is and her struggle with men in the Catholic hierarchy. I do think the author is making a point about the tensions between the male hierarchy and women religious in the US Catholic church, that these go back to the beginnings of the church in this country. The author also traces the deep relationships between Seton and other women and the spiritual friendships that she developed.

Barthel portrays the deep spirituality of this woman as she faces the loss of husband and later, two daughters (two of the three to tuberculosis, from which she also ultimately dies). Her devotion is not a highly theological one but rather one centered around the Eucharist and the scriptures and a life of prayer. In this she perhaps serves as a model for most Christians who do not have advanced theological training but can live devoted and significant lives, nonetheless.

Last of all, I’ve been struck with what a scourge tuberculosis was until the advent of antibiotics. “Consumption” turns up in so many stories of this period, whether it is a Tolstoy novel or a saints biography or in operas like La Boheme. It is a blessing that this is treatable, while a concern that recent recurrences have resulted in drug-resistant forms of the disease.

The book concludes with an epilogue discussing Elizabeth Ann Seton’s canonization and the process involved including the “vetting” of miracles and the use of a “devil’s advocate”. She became a saint in 1975 and her feast day is January 4.

[This review is based on a complimentary e-galley version of this book provided by the publisher through Netgalley. I have not been in any other way compensated for the review of this book.]

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