"With time running out, he had to chase his man down at the center of the mat before locking up again. His opponent blocked his move, maintaining his lead with less than ten seconds left. Jose lunged in for a front headlock and used all his strength, calling on all his hours of training and conditioning. I watched the final second tick away as Jose became a national wrestling champion. " In "A Saint in the City: Coaching At-Risk Kids to Be Champions," Scott Glabb shares his inspiring wrestling experiences from years of coaching the boys of Santa Ana High School with little hope for success, let alone a bright future. They had no prayer of a win, but Coach Glabb roused his athletes to bravely overcome their disadvantages to raise their school from being the pariah of Southern California wrestling to one of the most respected athletic programs in California. "A Saint in the City" openly describes the crime-ridden lives of athletes who didn't even hope for more until they started wrestling and found a coach who stirred them to greatness. Through Coach Glabb's reflections and his athletes' own words, "A Saint in the City" chronicles the tribulations and triumphs of one team that wrestled for victory.

An exploration of Beat spirituality--seen through excerpts from the writings of the seminal writers of Beat Generation themselves. It’s been said that Jack Kerouac made it cool to be a thinking person seeking a spiritual experience. And there is no doubt that the writers he knew and inspired—iconic figures like Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure—were thinkers seeking exactly that. In this re-claiming of their vision, Robert Inchausti explores the Beat canon to reveal that the movement was at heart a spiritual one. It goes deeper than the Buddhism with which many of the key figures became identified. It’s about their shared perception of an existence in which the Divine reveals itself in the ordinary. Theirs is a spirituality where real life triumphs over airy ideals and personal authenticity becomes both the content and the vehicle for a kind of refurbished American Transcendentalism.

An original and relevant study on female sanctity in Morocco that relies both in oral and written hagiographical sources. Memory and Presence of Female Saints in Ksar el Kebir focuses on the local to reflect on the wider and very relevant phenomenon of religious devotion and women in Western Islam.

This volume contains translations or summaries of the most important panegyrics in praise of Saint Bernard that were preached during the reign of Louis XIV. Some of the preachers were and are regarded as the greatest orators ever to grace the French pulpit. All the translations are extensively annotated, and there are three introductory chapters providing a necessary background for appreciating the sermons. Sixteen preachers are represented, and, with one exception, none of the material has ever appeared in English. For those interested in the afterlife of Saint Bernard, as he was used, and sometimes abused, in the reign of the Sun King, this collection provides essential primary sources.

Exiled from his native land by the Communist Chinese, Tibetan lama Dezhung Rinpoche arrived in Seattle and continued his role as a teacher of teachers, mentoring some of the most prominent Western scholars of Tibetan Buddhism today.

This book focuses on the comparatively unknown cults of new saints in late-mediaeval Venice. These new saints were near-contemporary citizens who were venerated by their compatriots without official sanction from the papacy. In doing so, the book uncovers a sub-culture of religious expression that has been overlooked in previous scholarship. The study highlights a myriad of hagiographical materials, both visual and textual, created to honour these new saints by members of four different Venetian communities: The Republican government; the monastic orders, mostly Benedictine; the mendicant orders; and local parishes. By scrutinising the hagiographic portraits described in painted vita panels, written vitae, passiones, votive images, sermons and sepulchre monuments, as well as archival and historical resources, the book identifies a specifically Venetian typology of sanctity tied to the idiosyncrasies of the city’s site and history. By focusing explicitly on local typological traits, the book produces an intimate and complex portrait of Venetian society and offers a framework for exploring the lived religious experience of late-mediaeval societies beyond the lagoon. As a result, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Venice, lived religion, hagiography, mediaeval history and visual culture.

In 2016 the Architect Guido Ambrogi began, at the request of some friends, to note down day by day the places in Rome where the Saints can be found, both through relics and through artistic representations. His Saints in Rome, thus, is a daily calendar, a "Roman Emerologio," for the benefit of all pilgrims.

The Oratorian priest Antonio Gallonio (1556-1605) devoted his life to writing about saints. The thread running through his hagiographical oeuvre was renunciation of this world: humility, subservience and endurance. Yet he engaged with the expertise of lay people, jurists, physicians and engineers, so as to appeal to their interests and convert them. In order to emphasize how saints endured torture, healed disease and exercised piety rather than ingenuity, Gallonio ventured into those secular disciplines, even if he did not endorse them. This book surveys Gallonio’s published and unpublished works and his position in Roman society, to expose the tensions between a theocratic clergy and the self-assertion of skilled and scholarly professionals in the Italian Counter-Reformation.

Ten pilgrimages in the form of biographies of early saints, such as St. Benedict, St. Francis, and St. Anthony, provide solutions and guidance for the modern traveller attempting to determine what to see and do in Italy with suggestions for intention, itinerary, maps, and detailed directions to the prime places in that person's life. Original.

"Sainthood" has been, and remains, a contested category in China, given the commitment of China's modern leadership to secularization, modernization, and revolution, and the discomfort of China's elite with matters concerning religion. However, sainted religious leaders have succeeded in rebuilding old institutions and creating new ones despite the Chinese government's censure. This book offers a new perspective on the history of religion in modern and contemporary China by focusing on the profiles of these religious leaders from the early 20th century through the present. Edited by noted authorities in the field of Chinese religion, Making Saints in Modern China offers biographies of prominent Daoists and Buddhists, as well as of the charismatic leaders of redemptive societies and state managers of religious associations in the People's Republic. The focus of the volume is largely on figures in China proper, although some attention is accorded to those in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other areas of the Chinese diaspora. Each chapter offers a biography of a religious leader and a detailed discussion of the way in which he or she became a "saint." The biographies illustrate how these leaders deployed and sometimes retooled traditional themes in hagiography and charismatic communication to attract followers and compete in the religious marketplace. Negotiation with often hostile authorities was also an important aspect of religious leadership, and many of the saints' stories reveal unexpected reserves of creativity and determination. The volume's contributors, from the United States, Canada, France, Italy, China, and Taiwan, provide cutting-edge scholarship. Taken together, these essays make the case that vital religious leadership and practice has existed and continues to exist in China despite the state's commitment to wholesale secularization.