Pragmatic Saintliness: Toward a Criticism and Celebration of Community

Abstract This essay responds to John McDermotts diagnosis of politics and religious life in the U.S.: [B]oth traditional political and religious institutions are no longer an adequate let alone rich resource for a celebratory language. I present a new celebratory language by reading William Jamess description of saintliness in Varieties of Religious Experience. James gives me the resources to naturalize and democratize saintliness. Distinguished not by her transcendent miracles but by her this-worldly energies and experiments, the pragmatic saint remakes the experience of her community through celebration, a form of appreciation and criticism exemplified in engaged art. My ethical and aesthetic description of the saint thus builds on E. Paul Colellas recent political description of the saint as the strenuous citizen.

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