AFTERLIVES OF THE SAINTS

In Afterlives of the Saints, Colin Dickey— author of Cranioklepty—presents us with a history of faith as told through some of the strangest stories of the saints. These are saints who murder, saints who gouge out their own eyes and hold them out for inspection, saints who minister to the petty and the bizarre and the maligned. These are saints who, when visited in a contemporary context—as saints in the cities—actually enlarge our concept of faith.

With a lively intellect and fresh insight, Dickey reveals that we can no longer experience the world as did the saints who once walked amongst us. Today, such ascetics, pushing their bodies to the edges of experience, would be labeled with all manner of clinical diagnoses: masochism, anorexia, schizophrenia. The old pathways to sainthood are clearly incompatible with modern life. In our world, such practices are pathologies.

And yet, these saints have become a creative engine by which we can tap into the rich attraction of excess, while safely observing a kind of superhuman insanity. Colin Dickey retells their stories, not as a theologian, but as someone trying to understand the ways of the world.