60 Second Review:
Saints Behaving Badly

The Book: Saints Behaving Badly: The Cutthroats, Crooks, Trollops, Con Men, and Devil-Worshippers Who Became Saints by Thomas Craughwell

:10 -- The Gist: Craughwell, a Catholic diocesan newspaper columnist, provides 28 biographical sketches of thieves, heretics, drunkards, rapists, Satanists, and other "notorious sinners" who later became followers of Christ and were canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.

:20 -- The Quote: "The inescapable fact remains that nowhere in the four gospels does it ever say that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute or in the any other way sexually promiscuous. True, the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke say that Christ cast seven devils out of Mary Magdalene, but that is not reason to assume that the demons made her a loose woman. Christ cast devils out of plenty of men too, but no one suggests that they were licentious." (From the Introduction)

:30 -- The Good: Craughwell helps dispel the myth that saints are moral superheroes and shows that saints are made by God's sovereign grace.

:40 -- The Bad: The subtitle gives a misleading impression. Rather than being exceptionally vicious evildoers, many of the saints profiled were merely garden-variety sinners (St. Genesius, Scoffer; St. Peter Claver, Dithering Novice; St. Pelagia, Promiscuous Actress, etc.).

:50 -- The Verdict: Craughwell does an admirable job of filling in the details that are usually glossed over with "he/she was once a great sinner." The brief snapshots from the "Whey They Were Heathens" period of these famous lives shows that the canonized are not that different from the rest of us saints. Although the natural audience for the book is Catholics, evangelicals and other Protestants would do well to read this brief biographical collection. Too often we tend to act as if church history began with St. Paul, skipped over to the Reformation, and then lay dormant until the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Saints Behaving Badly helps remind us that there are numerous sinners-turned-saints from our past that we can still learn from today.

:60 -- The Recommendation: For biography buffs, church history geeks, and anyone who has wanted a Cliff Notes version of Butler's Lives of the Saints.