Seminar in American Religion with Kathleen Sprows Cummings

Join us this Saturday, September 7, at 9:00 a.m. in the Morris Inn Private Dining Rooms for the fall 2019 Seminar in American Religion. Kathleen Sprows Cummings will discuss her new book, A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American (UNC Press, 2019). 

Commentators for this seminar are Christine Heyrman (University of Delaware) and Kevin M. Schultz (University of Illinois at Chicago). John T. McGreevy (University of Notre Dame) will moderate the discussion.

From the publisher:

What drove U.S. Catholics in their arduous quest to win an American saint? While canonization may be fundamentally about holiness, Catholics had an additional reason for petitioning the Vatican to acknowledge an American holy hero: a home-grown saint would not only mediate heaven and earth but also Catholicism and American culture. Throughout much of U.S. history, canonization served to affirm the Americanness of Catholics. Cummings’ vision of American sanctity shows just how much Catholics had at stake in cultivating devotion to men and women perched at the nexus of holiness and American history—until they finally felt little need to prove that they belonged.