Afterlives of the Saints Quotes

“The warrior-saint, George, now a national symbol, became inherently bound up in national conquest, in colonization.”
― Colin Dickey, Afterlives of the Saints

“As market capitalism developed in the Western world, the most dangerous element was those people who could not be assimilated into its new economies— the madman was not so much ill as he was useless. Worse, his uselessness was potentially contagious, and so it had to be contained.”
― Colin Dickey, Afterlives of the Saints

“Unlike those saints who are iconically associated with one distinct object— Sebastian with his arrows, Lawrence and his gridiron— Anthony is associated with plethora itself, with a multitude that can take any shape. Thus, it is his story that becomes paramount, and the beasts that surround him, with their increasing strangeness, give expression to a world in flux— our world.”
― Colin Dickey, Afterlives of the Saints

“It is here, in these misinterpretations, in the odd patronages of the saints, that Catholicism reveals its folk aspect, its native traditions and local customs. And it is here that Saint Lawrence reigns, his trickster laughter stretching the world beyond the humorlessness of the gospel truth and fundamentalism. On the other side of orthodoxy lies this legacy of distortion and expansion, where we look and do not see, yet see something new, something else entirely.”
― Colin Dickey, Afterlives of the Saints