If you follow me on social media, you’ve probably seen the project I’m working on for Lent: matching people with Saint friends. I’ve been loving the challenge of finding the right match and the responses I’ve been getting, both from the people I’ve matched and from people watching from the sidelines and finding all kinds of new friends. Honestly, I can’t tell you the joy it gives me to see dear, dear friends of mine shared 60 times on Facebook, introduced to thousands of new people who can learn from these Saints what following Christ might look like in their lives.
Through this whole project, people have been asking me where I find out all about these Saints. Honestly, the answer is Google, but I do have some go-to resources that I start with.
- Modern Saints by Ann Ball is the reason I love the Saints the way I do. For years after I met Jesus, I was okay with the idea of the Saints’ intercession (Rev 5:8) and the importance of their witness (1 Cor 11:1), but I didn’t really see why one would love them. Then I encountered these books and heard the stories of the Saints told well for the first time. Instead of boring stories that somehow didn’t in any way speak to the love of God, I encountered incredible adventures that gave me hope for the possibility of finding holiness in my own life, with my own struggles. And they’re so compelling that I actually wanted to keep reading, even after my self-imposed quota of spiritual reading was up! These two books are among the six most important books I’ve read in my life–grab a used copy of volume one and volume 2 today (or get them on kindle so you can search within the book for particular topics you’re interested in).
- Faces of Holiness by Ann Ball is a new discovery for me, and just as good as the earlier volumes. This one doesn’t seem to be available electronically.
- The Big Book of Women Saints by Sarah Gallick is also fantastic, though quite different. It has the stories of 365 different female Saints, and while Ball’s book gives the full story of each Saint, Gallick gives you a bite-sized taste, just enough to whet your appetite and send you to Google for more. This is an excellent book to get on Kindle so you can search within it.
- My 2017 articles on Aleteia were all about Saints. If you click here, you can scroll through and learn about 50 different Saints. Or you can search for a Saint with my name to see if I’ve written about them. There’s little that makes me crazier than Saint stories made dull and saccharine, so I can promise you one thing: these stories won’t be boring. (And if you want this and the Saint ninja project to turn into a book, you can support that by letting me know when you’re out of town and want me to hunker down in your house for a couple of weeks to write, because I can’t get anything done on the road.)
- www.catholicsaints.info is my favorite website, especially for seeing all the options for Saints on a particular day or for searching for a particular issue. Do a site search for a key word (piano or depression or Madagascar) and you’ll find a really good beginning to your research.
- Saintly Solutions to Life’s Common Problems (and its sequel) by Fr. Joseph M. Esper are wonderful books where you can look up struggles like anger, doubt, and marital problems to be pointed to Saints who walked the same path. It’s just a first step as it doesn’t give their whole stories, but it’s a great first step.
- Saints Behaving Badly by Thomas J. Craughwell is a fun read, but do me a favor and when the bishop asked you where you found your confirmation Saint, don’t tell him that I gave you a book with this title (as one of my students may have done into the microphone during confirmation).
- Louis de Wohl’s books are all fantastic. They’re novels, so you’ll have to do a little research to find out what’s truth and what’s fiction, but they’ll give you a sense of the Saint that will really help build a friendship rather than just an interest.
- Various other books–my Goodreads Saints shelf might help.
- My social media accounts have plenty of Saint stories–if you’re not following me yet on Instagram or Facebook, do it! And you can search my Facebook page for Saint’s names or features of their lives, or just look through my #blackSaints #AsianSaints and #LatinoSaints hashtags.
That’s all I’ve got for the moment–what other Saint books or websites do you love?
