Eighty percent of Filipinos (about 80 million people) identify with the Catholic faith. Visitors to the Philippines might find it surprising that images of Catholic saints, the Child Christ, and the Virgin Mary can be seen in all kinds of public and private spaces throughout this Asian country, such as in restaurants, shopping malls, pasted to walls, painted on buses, and of course, in-home altars. Many of these saints bear Spanish names and their legends almost always date to the period of Spanish colonialism. Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines under Early Spanish Rule explores why, in spite of their fraught history with Spanish colonialism (which ended in 1898), Filipinos have staunchly held on to the faith in their saints. This is the first scholarly study to focus on the dynamic life of saints and their devotees in the Spanish Philippines, from the sixteenth through the early part of the eighteenth century. The book offers an in-depth analysis of the origins and development of the beliefs and rituals surrounding some of the most popular saints in the Philippines, namely, Santo Niño de Cebu, Our Lady of Caysasay, Our Lady of La Naval, and Our Lady of Antipolo. Christina Lee recovers the voices of colonized Philippine subjects as well as those of Spaniards who, through the veneration of miraculous saints, projected and relieved their grievances, anxieties, and histories of communal suffering. Based on critical readings of primary sources, the book traces how individuals and their communities often refashioned iconographic devotions to the Holy Child and to the Virgin Mary by introducing non-Catholic elements derived from pre-Hispanic, animistic, and Chinese traditions. Ultimately, the book reveals how Philippine natives, Chinese migrants, and Spaniards reshaped the imported devotions as expressions of dissidence, resistance, and survival.

Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines under Early Spanish Rule is the first scholarly study to focus on the dynamic life of saints and their devotees in the Spanish Philippines from the sixteenth through the early part of the eighteenth century. Christina Lee recovers the voices of colonized Philippine subjects as well as those of Spaniards who, through the veneration of miraculous saints, projected and relieved their grievances, anxieties, and histories of communal suffering.

At the height of World War II, a small band of students in Munich, Germany, formed a clandestine organization called the White Rose, which exposed the Nazi regime's murderous atrocities and called for its overthrow. In its first anti-Nazi tract, the group wrote, "...Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be 'governed' without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct..." The students risked everything to struggle against a world that had lost its moorings. Early in 1943 key members of the group were discovered and executed. Among those put to death was Alexander Schmorell, a young man of Russian birth whose family came to Germany when he was a small boy. This biography eloquently recounts the journey of an energetic and talented young man who loved life but who, deeply inspired by his Orthodox Christian faith, was willing to sacrifice it as a testimony to his faith in God that had taught him to love beauty and freedom, both of which the Nazis sought to destroy. In 2012, the Russian Orthodox Church officially recognized him as a martyr and saint. The story of Alexander's life and death is made available to English readers here for the first time, vividly illustrated with black and white photographs.

In 1894 a Muslim mystic named Muḥammad al-Kattānī abandoned his life of asceticism to preach Islamic revival and jihad against the French. Ten years later, he mobilized a Moroccan resistance against French colonization. This book narrates the story of al-Kattānī and his virtual disappearance from accounts of modern Moroccan history.

While the modern world has largely dismissed the figure of the saint as a throwback, we remain fascinated by excess, marginality, transgression, and porous subjectivity—categories that define the saint. In this collection, Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner bring together top scholars from across the humanities to reconsider our denial of saintliness and examine how modernity returns to the lure of saintly grace, energy, and charisma. Addressing such problems as how saints are made, the use of saints by political and secular orders, and how holiness is personified, Saints takes us on a photo tour of Graceland and the cult of Elvis and explores the changing political takes on Joan of Arc in France. It shows us the self-fashioning of culture through the reevaluation of saints in late-antique Judaism and Counter-Reformation Rome, and it questions the political intent of underlying claims to spiritual attainment of a Muslim sheikh in Morocco and of Sephardism in Israel. Populated with the likes of Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, and Padre Pio, this book is a fascinating inquiry into the status of saints in the modern world.

How should the Catholic church remember the sins of its saints? This question proves particularly urgent in the case of those saints who were canonized due to their relation to black slavery. Today, many of their racial virtues seem like racial vices. In this way, the church celebrates Peter Claver, a seventeenth-century Spanish missionary to Colombia, as “the saint of the slave trade,” and extols Martín de Porres as the patron saint of mixed race people. But in truth, their sainthoods have upheld anti-blackness much more than they have undermined it. Habituated by anti-blackness, the church has struggled to perceive racial holiness accurately. In the ongoing cause to canonize Pierre Toussaint, a Haitian-born former slave, the church continues to enact these bad racial habits. This book proposes black fugitivity, as both a historical practice and an interpretive principle, to be a strategy by which the church can build new hagiographical habits. Rather than searching inside itself for racial heroes, the church should learn to celebrate those black fugitives who sought refuge outside of it.

The Saints of Santo Domingo: Dominican Resistance in the Age of Neocolonialism tells the story of a generation of Dominican warriors, who surrendered their energies, and often their lives, in the struggle against devastating poverty, glaring social inequality and state violence. Daniel Shaw, a professor of Latin American and Caribbean studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Eugenio María de Hostos College, recounts the lives of the persecuted leaders of the clandestine FALPO and MPD. Shaw -an internationalist and anti-imperialist leader in the United States- has lived alongside and organized with social movements in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Central America, Brazil and Western Africa. Guided by a profound sense of loss and duty, Shaw seeks to rescue from oblivion the example of Chu, Furi, Claridad and other larger than life Dominican fighters who were assassinated by the neocolonial Dominican state. Among the other themes explored in his timely book are Haitian-Dominican unity, forced migration and the everyday survival of the exiled Dominican community in New York City. The Saints of Santo Domingo is a must read for any student of Dominican history trying to bridge the gap between the murderous regimes of Trujillo and Balaguer, and the present day repression of the popular, anti-imperialist movement.