The Lives and Writings of the Saints

“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,”  so the saying goes. If it is true, then this last century should reap a great harvest of souls, given time. There have certainly been many martyrs throughout the world, during this century! and there continue to be. The problem is, most of us think that the Age of Martyrs is long past.  in fact, Christians continue to die for their faith, but in today’s world that isn’t news when compared to the comings and goings of celebrities.   One wonders where the real heroes have gone, and how one can find out the truth about them. One might wish to learn to recognize the pattern of sainthood, of heroic virtue, the depth of saintly faith and the reason for love so great that so many could and do “lay down their lives”.   To use an old and neglected word, one might wish to know the reason for a true holy “theosis” --  that quality in these holy men and women that binds them to God so closely in love that they become divinized and their fame lasts hundreds of years while people invoke their names, using their lives as templates of virtue to follow.
In any hagiography, any life of a "saint" (a holy man or woman recognized by the universal church as having led a life of heroic virtue), we will find keys to understanding what great love for others really is, and how to allow such a Love to lead our lives. Saintly men and women from the early church to the present day  were in every other aspect of their lives BUT this,  ordinary men and women. Their exceptional heroism of virtue, their inspirational writings, their virtuous lives and deeds should be studied and taken up by the rest of us who are called to live out a similar discipleship of Christ. In the early church, members called each other by the name “saint”, and we should recapture that habit today, thereby encouraging one another in the pursuit and practice of sanctity.
Here at The Christian Book Corner we are assembling a growing collection of works about our virtuous and saintly brothers and sisters as an aid to your own growth in holiness -- to inspire the young and comfort the old, to act as a guides along our common way, and so that, in learning about these others who have gone before us and their great Love we may feel called to ask them to help us. You will find among t-CBC.com's carefully chosen collection of inspirational writings about the saints something for yourself as well as things that will make a perfect gift for friends or family members which will open up for them interiorly a better world, a better Hope.