"The idea of saints and sainthood are familiar to all, irrelevant of religious faith. Simon Yarrow looks at the origins, ideas, and definitions of sainthood, sanctity, and saints in the early Church, tracing their development in history and explaining the social roles saints played in the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds. Along the way Yarrow considers the treatment of saints as objects of literary and artistic expression and interpretation, and...

Jon Krakauer's literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. He now shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders, taking readers inside isolated American communities where some 40,000 Mormon Fundamentalists still practice polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like...

"The first major history of Mormonism in a decade, drawing on newly available sources to reveal a profoundly divided faith that has nevertheless shaped the nation"--

"In the predominantly Mormon city of Draper, Utah, some seemingly perfect families have deadly secrets...Linda Wallheim is the mother of five grown boys and the wife of a Mormon bishop. As bishop, Kurt Wallheim is the ward's designated spiritual father, and that makes Linda the ward's unofficial mother, and her days are filled with comfort visits, community service, and informal counseling. But Linda is increasingly troubled by the church's patriarchal...

"In seventeenth-century Peru, St. Martin de Porres was torn from his body after death. His bones were pillaged as relics, and his spirit was said to inhabit those bones. Four centuries later, amid the havoc of Hurricane Katrina, nineteen-year-old Ham escaps New Orleans with his only valued possession: a pendant handed down from his foster mother, Miss Pearl. There's something about the pendant that has always gripped him, and the curiosity of it has...

Explains what saints are and introduces the morals and values of various saints.

Relates the life and legends of Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.

For more than two centuries, Butler's Lives of the Saints has been hailed as the authority on the Christian patron saints. Now, in this new edition of the original classic, Michael Walsh has culled the rich resources of earlier editions to accentuate the more modern and best-documented saints. Echoing the charm and style of the eighteenth-century edition, Walsh's volume has been edited to make the fascinating and inspiring lives of the saints easily...

"Kuan Yin, whose name means "one who hears the cries of the world, " is perhaps the most widely revered Buddhist saint in the world. Known as Avalokiteshvara in Sanskrit, Kannon in Japanese, and Chenrezig in Tibetan, this compassionate bodhisattva is at the heart of all Mahayana Buddhist traditions. Sometimes depicted as male and other times as female, Kuan Yin took the vow to free all sentient beings from their suffering. The legend of Princess Miao-Shan...

When her convent is attacked by possessed soldiers, Artemisia defends the Gray Sisters by awakening the revenant bound to a saint's relic, even though she runs the risk of being possessed permanently by the powerful ancient spirit. The dead of Loraille do not rest. If the bodies of the deceased are not cleansed so their souls can pass on, they will rise as spirits with a ravenous hunger for the living. When her convent is attacked by possessed soldiers,...