The defense of the cult of saints and relics was an essential element of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in Europe. Facing attacks from Protestant denominations of all kinds, the Roman church redoubled its efforts to promote the veneration of its holy figures and to house their earthly remains in dramatic style. Bedazzled Saints chronicles the transfer, distribution, and display of nearly four hundred "holy bodies" of ancient Christian martyrs, some of the church’s most prestigious relics, sent from the Roman catacombs to the Electorate of Bavaria between 1590 and 1803. Local communities, both religious and secular, broke with medieval tradition and spent immense amounts of time and money to fuse incomplete skeletons into lavishly decorated whole-body saints. By examining these ornamented skeletons—painstakingly enhanced with jewels and fine clothing and still on display atop church altars to this day—Noria Litaker elucidates the interplay between local religious practice and universal church doctrine, shedding new light on the negotiated nature of sanctity in early modern Catholicism. In so doing, she challenges the dominant narrative of the Bavarian Catholic Reformation as a top-down process and provides new insights into the role relics and their innovative presentation played in the development of Catholic identity in early modern German lands.

A Sukhoi Superjet carrying a Very Important Person, plunges from the sky over subarctic Russia. A Canadian Disaster Recovery Agent inspecting the crash site is murdered. CDRA sends in their best to investigate. Man-of-the-world adventurer, Adam Saint, lives a fast-paced, often dangerous, always exciting life. When a passenger train crashes in Detroit, terrorists blow up a public building in Belfast, a cyclone ravages Bangladesh, or Angola descends into civil war, if Canadians are there, so is the CDRA. And so is Adam Saint. Russian investigation is derailed when he receives devastating personal news. Suddenly, the penultimate man of action is thrown into emotional and physical turmoil that tests his moral fortitude. Finding himself thrust into a fight for his life, Saint undertakes a thrilling journey of danger and deceit from the bucolic prairies of Saskatchewan and high rise hijinks of corporate Toronto, through London's outer boroughs, to steamy Southeast Asia and Sin City itself, Las Vegas. Failure is not an option. Until it is.

The purpose of this book is to call your attention to twenty men and women whose lives can provide inspiration and examples for those trying to follow Christ today as best they can. They are real, flesh-and-blood people, human beings with the same weaknesses we all possess as human beings, but with an inner strength and purposefulness that can serve as examples to us in the daily struggle that is life today.

Legends, tales, and mysteries featuring saints captivated the French at the end of the nineteenth century. As Jean Lorrain pointed out in an 1891 article for the popular weekly Le Courrier Francais, the seemingly simple language of the saints' lives, their noble battles between good and evil and the atmosphere of religious mysticism appealed to many, especially those involved in the visual and performing arts. Ironically The Third Republic (1870-1940), a regime that claimed to reinforce and institute the secular ideas of the French Revolution, was witness to this great popular interest in the saints and religious imagery. The eight essays in this work explore the popularity of the saints from the 1850s to the 1920s. The essays evaluate the role they played in literature, art, music, science, history and politics, examine portrayals of the saints' lives in both low and high culture (from children's literature, shadow plays and the popular press to literature, opera and theological studies), and reveal the prevalence of the saints in fin-de-siecle France.

2022 Catholic Media Association second place award in mysticism From its origins in the fourth and fifth centuries, first in monastic circles and then in wider Christian communities, the story of Mary of Egypt was wildly popular. From early Christianity through the medieval periods, from Egypt to Scandinavia, verse lives in Greek, Latin, and vernacular languages portray her as the model of repentance. Continuously venerated in the liturgy and icons of the Orthodox Churches, she is now seldom known in the West. This modern verse life and the accompanying essay reintroduces St. Mary’s extraordinary life, its theological and spiritual implications, and its remarkable depiction of gender complementarity.

Didier Maleuvre argues that works of art in Western societies from Ancient Greece to the interconnected worlds of the Digital Age have served to rationalize and normalize an engagement with bourgeois civilization and the city. Maleuvre details that the history of art itself is the history civilization, giving rise to the particular aesthetics and critical attitudes of respective moments and movements in changing civilizations in a dialogical mode. Building a visual cultural account of shifting forms of culture, power, and subjectivity, Maleuvre illustrates how art gave a pattern and a language to the model of social authority rather than simply functioning as a reflective one. Through a broad cultural study of the relationship between humanity, art, and the culture of civilization, Maleuvre introduces a new set of paradigms that critique and affirm the relationship between humanity and art, arguing for it as an engine of social reproduction that transforms how culture is inhabited.