52 Saints ~ Help Needed

See below if you are having trouble leaving comments.

...but I'm really thinking about it as 52 people who were saints.

As some of you know, I have been contributing to a series on 52 different authors on Maclin Horton's blog, Light on Dark Water. During the year, people have been suggesting different topics that we could write about next year, and two of those topics were 52 Movies and 52 Saints. Then, someone had the idea that we should do movies there, and saints here, so that is what we are going to try to do. Several commenters from that blog have volunteered to write about saints here, but I would like some of the people who read The Three Prayers to contribute also. I know you are out there because you have told me so, and I know that several of you would be more than capable of writing a post about a saint--or two--or three, so I hope you will volunteer.

I've been thinking a lot about this project, and about how we can keep it from becoming just a lot of pious hagiography. If I'm going to do this--if we are going to do this--I would like it to be a bit meatier than that. I've been trying to think of ways that that could happen.

At first I thought that we shouldn't do saints that were really popular like Francis, Theresa of Avila, etc., because there are a million websites out there that have so much stuff about them and everybody knows it all, but then it occurred to me that if you can talk about them from a different angle, one that not so many people are familiar with that could be great. I mean, everybody knows most of what is in Story of a Soul, but if you could write about St. Thérèse's letters, or her correspondence with the young priest, Maurice, that would work well. Or it could be some personal experience you had with the saint, for instance, I could write about the things that happened on our family's trip to visit St. Thérèse's relics. Or you could write about different authors who have written about the saint or a review a book, for instance, Heather King has a very nice book about the year she with Story of a Soul. There are just a lot of different ways to approach the saints.

It would be nice, though, to have some saints we don't know very well. Pope St. John Paul II canonized so many and there ought to be good information out there. And someone asked about Orthodox saints, and that would be great, but not protestants who we think are probably saints.

 I plan to do this on Sundays, so I would need them by Saturday. I will take the first Sunday and I will write about Junipero Serra.

So, if you are willing to give this a try, please let me know in the comments, or contact me any way you know how. Tell me what saints you want to write about, and if you have an idea of when you want to do it, tell me that, too.

 If you are thinking you can't do this, please give it another thought.

 AMDG

For some reason, it's very difficult to leave comments here and I have no idea what to do about it. When you write a comment, copy it before you submit it and then you can paste it and resend if it doesn't appear. It usually works the second time around. I'm really sorry about this.

JTC