In the introduction which opens Saints: Faith Without Borders, Françoise Meltzer and Jaś Elsner contend that saints provide “a space in which to think differently, to think against or outside socially normative patterns” (ix): saints “queer stable binary structures”; saints “are outside the norm”; saints are “a contradiction” (ix-x). Indeed, what Meltzer and Elsner propose about saints might just as readily describe their edited volume itself. Composed of eighteen diverse essays, Saints: Faith Without Borders (as its title suggests) does not fit easily into any one disciplinary category. Rather, the volume—which includes contributions not just from scholars of religious studies, but also from artists, political scientists, a well-known philosopher, and a practicing psychiatrist—is itself a study in hybridity.

Among the collection of essays included in Saints: Faith Without Borders are a number which highlight the theme of hybridity in the study of saints and sanctity. What Michael A. Di Giovine (“Re-presenting a Contemporary Saint: Padre Pio of Pietrelcina”) illustrates by way of images which juxtapose the mundane facts of twenty-first century life (televisions, souvenirs, obituary notices) with the sacred history of Padre Pio, is elegantly articulated by Robert Maniura (“Persuading the Absent Saint: Image and Performance in Marian Devotion”) who draws attention to the hybrid identity of the saint. “The characteristics of saints,” insists Maniura, “are to be sought not in the inherent qualities of a category of persons but in the behavior of those who interact, or attempt to interact, with them” (253). For Simon Ditchfield (“Thinking with Saints: Sanctity and Society in the Early Modern World”), it is the hybridity of the cult of the saint—which performs a broad range of cultural work and is best understood as a “synaesthetic experience, involving all the senses” (159)—that deserves notice. Julia Kristeva's essay (“Saint Teresa of Avila”) likewise attends to the fact of hybridity in the study of saints and sanctity. Writing about Teresa of Avila who represents a mystical tradition at once at the margins of Catholicism “and yet at its heart” (322), Kristeva offers an interpretation of Teresa's ecstasies as regression back to the “psyche-soma” (328), a state marked by “the copresence and copenetration that makes being into living being” (330).

The paradox of sanctity emerges as a second dominant theme in Saints: Faith Without Borders. Marc Blanchard (“From Cuba with Saints”) examines the ways in which the orisha paradoxically satisfies both the nationalist project of the Cuban state and the Afro-Cuban project of resistance. Simon Coleman (“Transgressing the Self: Making Charismatic Saints”) likewise focuses on the play of paradox in the construction of the charismatic saint who embodies exceptional holiness within the context of an evangelical Christianity premised on the equality of all believers. Similarly, Daniel Boyarin's essay (“Patron Saint of the Incongruous: Rabbi Me'ir, the Talmud, and Menippean Satire”) draws attention to the fact of paradox both in Talmudic representations of second-century Palestinian Rabbi Me'ir and in the text of the Talmud itself. In the process of at once praising and disparaging Rabbi Me'ir, Boyarin argues, the Talmud illuminates the “fundamental contradiction” (154) in sanctity and the “sophistry … [that is] at the very heart of the Talmudic enterprise itself, an enterprise that both asserts the value of and critiques the limitations of intellect as means of knowledge and control of the world” (152).

If the hybridity of the saints and the paradox of sanctity are two themes animating the essays in Saints: Faith Without Borders, the relationship between sainthood and modernity is a third. David Tracy's excellent essay (“On Naming Saints”) proposes a new model of sanctity appropriate to a modern world grappling with global injustice. What the world needs now, argues Tracy, is a saint based on “the ancient Greek notion of the hero” (109) who gains “wisdom through heroic suffering, openness to joy and … a yes to life in all its moods” (113). These new saints—recognized by popular rather than institutional acclaim—are at once “newly empowered, individual selves” (122) and at the same time profoundly other-centered. Two contributions—Françoise Meltzer's “Reviving the Fairy Tree: Tales of European Sanctity” and Malika Zeghal's “On the Politics of Sainthood: Resistance and Mimicry in Postcolonial Morocco”—examine the cultural work performed by saints within contemporary political contexts. While Meltzer attends to the ways in which Joan of Arc “is being used by the French president [Sarkozy] … to elide the separation between the religious and the secular” (67) as a means of defining French identity, Zeghal investigates the ways in which the efficacy of the saint as a figure of political resistance changes when “spheres of political competition are opened up” (221).

Although this volume would have been better had the editors more ruthlessly edited some of the weaker contributions (such as Lawrence Jasud's rather facile essay “St. Elvis”), scholars of saints and sanctity—as well as scholars of sociology, political science, literature, and others—will find in Saints: Faith Without Borders much food for thought. Saints: Faith Without Borders deserves attention, not only on account of the sophisticated content of most of the essays but also on account of the structure of the volume itself which provocatively defies scholarly convention by its “inorganicism, the very indecorousness and jangling” (142) together of incongruous elements.