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Blessed Among All Women: Women Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time

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Blessed among women is the latest volume from the finest interpreter of holiness in life we have, Robert Ellsberg. He has edited the writings and written about such living icons of our time as Dorothy Day, Charles deFoucauld, Carlo Caretto, to note but a few. His award-winning volume, All Saints, gave us a porrtrait of a holy man or woman each day for a year from across the centuries and the communities of faith. It remains one of the best gifts for spiritual reading for any occasion. In The Saints' Guide to Happiness he dug deeply into the holy life: the tools of sanctity, the struggles, questions, the ways in which people have lived a godly life. I have used this with great profit in my undergradute courses. Now, Blessed Among All Women takes us into the personalities, the lives, the accomplishments of holy women all too often overlooked and ignored. Using the Beatitudes as a framework he presents to us remarkable but not always familiar women of valor such as poet and Carmelite Jessica Powers, martyr of the concentartion camps and writer Etty Hillesum, theologian and mystic Adrienne von Speyer and social activist Cornelia Connelly, among dozens more martyrs, prophets, teachers, and reformers. This is but one more gift to our spiritual lives, for our spiritual reading and most of all to our imitation.
Fr. Michael Plekon, priest in the Orthodox Church in America, Professor, City University of New York, Baruch College, Sociology/Anthropology, Program in Religion & Culture

If you're like me, your childhood was saturated by mawkish tales of holier-than-life saints who were always going around suffering martyrdom with eyes piously turned heavenward. The sheer unreality of such stories inhibited me from taking saints seriously until Robert Ellsberg's 1997 book _All Saints_ awakened me to the fact that saints, both "official" and "unofficial," are ordinary people who manage to love kindness, do justice, and walk humbly with God in extraordinary ways. They're not other-worldly fictions. They're brothers and sisters whose examples help awaken us to our own sainthood.

In his new _Blessed Among All Women_ Ellsberg continues his exploration by offering nearly 150 new vignettes of women saints (again, "official" as well as "unofficial") who have been touched by God and whose witnesses in turn touch us. The vignettes are organized into eight sections that correspond not only to the eight Beatitudes, but also to different approaches to God: contemplative enclosure, gospel-based activism, penitence, mysticism, artistic creativity, and so on. Some of the women Ellsberg writes about are traditional figures: Clare of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena. Others are less conventional but totally deserving of our consideration: the four girls martyred in 1963 at the bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the "witches" of Salem, and Karla Faye Tucker, executed by the state of Texas in 1998.

Ellsberg's treatment of the saints in _Blessed_ is loving and insightful, with no hint of false piety or sentimentalism. Moreover, he's sensitive to the fact that the spiritual journeys of women saints are often complicated by cultural assumptions about gender, and that many were (and are) persecuted because their fierce devotion to God led them down paths that violated conventional gender norms (the Beguine saints are tragic examples of this) as well as conventional religious sensibilities.

All in all, a fantastically inspiring, thought-provoking book. Highly recommended.

Robert Ellsberg has another extraordinary book here. As with "The Saints' Guide to Happiness" and "All Saints," he has done obviously extensive research in learning of well- and not-so-well-known people who have heard how God was prompting them to a mission. This time, the spotlighted people are women who discerned that prompting and the book tells how they moved forward with it.
Ellsberg has a marvelous gift of taking the details of rarely wonderful lives and compacting those details while also making them totally readable, fascinaing and inspiring. The women about whose lives he has written are remarkable.
No matter what your gender, if you are looking for spiritual inspiration, this book is well worth considering.

This is a superb book dealing with women who might well be forgotten.
The author has emphasized their heroism wihtout bravado.
He has also presented their spirituality without being sacharine.
A very good read. Highly recommended especially for the macho class.

I have this book by my bed and read about two or three special women each night. The short biographies provided are inspiring, but also peck at ones conscience by illustrating the heights human beings can take in their short time on earth regardless of their circumstances. It reminds me of the way I felt when reading Galileo's Daughter -- women have managed to live God-filled and remarkable lives by doing what was doable and never giving up. Women in this book never let others convince them that their contributions were insignificant or unimportant. From Mary (Mother of Jesus) to Anne Frank-- from St. Therese to Sojourner Truth, these are special lives worth reading about. Buy this book not by what it might do to your head, by what these simple stories may do to your heart and soul.

A fit companion to his genius ALL SAINTS and more recent LETTERS OF DOROTHY DAY.

Re: the former--my review:

All Saints by Robert Ellsberg by Mike Foster for "Off The Shelf," Gilbert magazine, 2006.

Just as the body requires its breakfast bacon, the soul too needs sustenance for what awaits it in this sweet and sin-filled world each day.
Robert Ellsberg's 1997 book, subtitled "Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time," provides 365 brief biographies, beginning with Jesus' mother Mary on Jan. 1 and ending with St. Melania the Younger, a Roman wife, mother, monk, and friend of Sts. Augustine, Jerome, and Paula (also featured in All Saints) whose pilgrimage ended with her death in Bethlehem Dec. 31, 439.
St. Melania is not the only little-known holy one cited in Ellsberg's canon. The usual suspects--Peter, Paul, Matthew, assorted Thomases and Francises and Johns and Ignatii--are there. But so are two Mechtilds, Hackeborn and Magdeburg, not to mention St. Victricius, the Roman soldier convert who threw down his arms and became bishop of Rouen.
Ellsberg's communion of saints is catholic in the small "C" sense. It includes holy folk from other faiths, like Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Etty Hillesum, and Mahatma Gandhi. In this book's heaven, there'll be not only mystics, missionaries, and martyrs, but also Mozart.
Peacemakers, as children of God, are numerous: Peter Maurin, Henry David Thoreau, A.J. Muste, Ammon Hennacy, Franz Jagerstatter, John Leary, Sojourner Truth, and Fr. James "Guadalupe" Carney. Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Cesar Chavez, Dorothy L. Day, Oskar Schindler, and the four little girls killed in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham rub shoulders with popes and cardinals, nuns and abbots, hermits and theologians.
Beginning with St. Caedmon, literature is well-represented: Flannery O'Connor, George Herbert, Thomas Merton, Leo Tolstoy, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dante Alighieri.
And yes, G.K. Chesterton, "Apologist, 1874-1936," makes the roster, flanked by Walker Percy and St. Joan of Arc, on May 29, his birthday. Ellsberg begins each of these one- to two-page entries with an epigraphical quote from the day's beatifee: "A characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly." A succinct, spirited biography follows, generously larded with quotes: "All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death."
Chesterton's populist views and epigrammatic style are extolled, as is his patriotic opposition to the Boer war. Distributism as aptly defined as "a sort of economic democracy based on principles of decentralization of property and power." Entries conclude with a further reading reference; in this case, Margaret Canovan's G.K. Chesterton: Radical Populist and Nigel Forte's collection A Motley Wisdom.
Readers will meet heroes they never heard of, like Hans and Sophie Scholl, whose secret White Rose Society published leaflets and graffiti opposing Hitler in late 1942, convicted of treason and beheaded Feb. 22, 1943.
Commemorated Dec. 8 is Fr. Walter Ciszek, the Jesuit priest imprisoned in Siberia in 1941, where he risked his life saying Mass and administering sacraments in brutal conditions. Presumed dead, he was released in 1963, and preached God's providence in New York until he died 21 years later.
Critics may quibble inclusions--St. Catherine of Alexandria, who never existed--and exclusions--C.S. Lewis. Some would be reluctant electees: "When they call you a saint, it means basically you're not to be taken seriously," Dorothy Day often said.
My third reading of All Saints will conclude Nov. 13, the tenth anniversary of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin's death. More pages will be dog-eared and annotated before it returns to the shelf. Add it to your library if you lack it; a year from the day you do, you will thank us.