Saints in Divided Societies

An ambitious interreligious and interdisciplinary compendium that illuminates the power of saintly figures in intractable social conflicts

In our contemporary world, interactions and attitudes across differences in wealth, ethnicity, religion, or political values have often given way to fear and blame between identity groups. Some such diversities have been rendered sites of raw antagonism by cultural narratives and ideological agendas, hardening into intractable divisions that manifest as sectarian violence or the closing of physical borders. In such divided societies, religious understandings are only ever part of the picture, but their symbol-systems and invitations to identification and exclusion can become exceptionally potent.

Saints in Divided Societies offers a set of ten disciplinarily, geographically, and religiously diverse case studies from the Mediterranean, Asia, and the Americas, along with illuminating contributions by scholar-poets working in these regions and a substantial theoretical chapter anchoring the volume’s overarching argument. The case studies explore how saintly figures—human beings who are encountered as embodiments of a community’s highest values, loyalties, identities, and understandings of what is true—are constructed aesthetically and mobilized politically in modern divided societies. Attending primarily to Christian and Muslim traditions, the volume’s chapters interpret how saintly figures and the diverse imaginaries of holiness that they crystallize can come to reinforce, undermine, or reconfigure the social divisions within which they move. The volume thus contributes to interdisciplinary debates over the explanation and cross-cultural comparability of “saintly” phenomena, while engaging urgent contemporary questions (underrepresented in anthropological and theological studies of saints alike) of the functions of saintly rhetorics and media in the dynamics of violent social conflict.