INTERVIEW BY M A D DY G R E E N
Interview
The Saints and Sinners Matchmaker WITH
Karen Wright Marsh
hen you think of the saints, what comes to mind? Likely, they’re stiff, haloed figures in stained glass, gazing up to the heavens, a soft light shining through their faces. They’re the superstars of the Christian faith, celebrated for superhuman acts of piety and discipline. But as awe-inspiring as such people can be, their sanctity can also feel sanctimonious and unfamiliar, especially to those who are tentative about faith in the first place. As the Catholic social justice advocate Dorothy Day famously said, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” Karen Wright Marsh doesn’t want you to dismiss the saints, either. She employs the term “saint” generously, in the broadest sense, often pairing it with “sinner” to remind you that even the saints were hopelessly human. Marsh is the author of Vintage Saints and Sinners: 25 Christians Who Transformed My Faith, in which she writes about canonized icons like Augustine, Thérèse of Lisieux, and Mother Teresa, alongside figures like the fiction writer Flannery O’Connor, philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and pioneer and memoirist Mary Paik Lee.
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THE MOCKINGBIRD
