Thirty lives. Two thousand years. One unbroken conversation.
Every saint in this book is dead. Some have been gone for a few decades. Some for two thousand years. Their bones are scattered across deserts, under cathedral floors, in Polish pits and English parish churches and boxes on a shelf in Calcutta.
Yet they keep talking.
From John the Baptist at the Jordan to Billy Graham at the stadium pulpit, The Voices of the Saints tells the stories of thirty Christians whose choices shaped the church and the world we know – and who still speak with startling clarity to the questions of our age. Augustine’s restless heart. Francis of Assisi’s poverty. Joan of Arc’s burning. Thomas Aquinas’s silence. Maximilian Kolbe’s volunteer death. Mother Teresa’s fifty-year dark night of the soul. Together they are a chorus.
They are a biography of the church and its theology, told through the histories of its saints. Each chapter sits at a turning point in the Christian tradition: the founding of the church, the work of the early Fathers, the medieval disruptors, the Reformation, the missionary frontier, and the witnesses of the modern age. Whether saint, mystic, martyr, apostle, or reformer, every figure is brought back to life in a modern retelling that captures who they really were.
Inside the book you’ll meet:
The wild ascetic who baptized Jesus and screamed at kings from the desertThe fisherman with a big mouth and a brave heart who crumbled when it mattered mostThe doubter who demanded to touch the wounds, then carried the faith to the far side of the worldThe fourteenth-century laywoman who ordered a sitting Pope back to RomeThe German monk whose question detonated a continentThe Spanish nun who lectured her own InquisitionThe Polish priest who walked willingly into another man’s starvation cellThe atheist Oxford professor who came to faith kicking and screamingWhether you grew up in church or have always wondered what the saints are actually for, this is the introduction to the lives of the saints that the curious reader didn’t receive and may not have known they wanted. Discover the story of our faith, told through thirty lives that transformed it.
Open the book. Hear them.
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A full list of the saints are as follows:
Part I · Foundations
St. John the BaptistSt. Peter the ApostleSt. Thomas the ApostleSt. Mary MagdaleneSt. Paul the ApostleSt. John the ApostlePart II · Architects
St. Ignatius of AntiochSt. Polycarp of SmyrnaSt. Nicholas & St. ValentineSt. Augustine of HippoSt. Benedict of NursiaPart III · Disruptors
St. Hildegard of BingenSt. DominicSt. Francis of AssisiSt. Thomas AquinasSt. Catherine of SienaSt. Joan of ArcPart IV · Reformation & Response
Martin LutherThomas CranmerJohn CalvinSt. Ignatius of LoyolaSt. Teresa of ÁvilaPart V · Revivals & New Worlds
John WesleyJohn Newton & The AbolitionistsSt. Elizabeth Ann SetonSt. Thérèse of LisieuxPart VI · Voices for Today
St. Maximilian KolbeC.S. LewisSt. Mother TeresaBilly Graham
