Diana Butler Bass
"Sit down and pour yourself a glass of Karen Wright Marsh's Vintage Saints and Sinners. At first sip, you are transported into delightful stories of Christians past. As you drink more deeply, Vintage Saints and Sinners engages difficult issues of faith, doubts and loves, wisdom, and the practice of justice in the world. This is a gracious book full of charming prose and profound truths with just the right complexity of spiritual insight for everyday life. Taste and see!"
C. Christopher Smith
"Told with humor and vulnerability, this work introduces us afresh to twenty-five brothers and sisters who challenge us with their honest faith."
Bob Dixon-Kolar
"Marsh provides an illuminating biographical sketch for each of the 25 Christians. She clearly demonstrates a scholar's command of their lives and key writings. But she does not impart this learning in a 'teacherly' way. Rather, she relates their life stories as compelling spiritual journeys that support her in her own spiritual journey. . . . I encourage Friends to read Vintage Saints and Sinners, either as an aid to solitary devotion or for use in a book discussion series for Quaker teens and adults."
Jeff J. Myers
"Marsh honors the beauty and goodness of these saints' lives without allowing us to dismiss them too easily. In so doing, we can appreciate that they are simultaneously saints and sinners—just like us."
Susan R. Holman
"This page-turning pilgrimage journal offers readers way-bread from—and for—the fallible and glorious communion of quotidian saints."
Steven Garber
"It's not hard to imagine being drawn into a good conversation about things that matter with Karen Marsh. At the same time playful and profound, with heart and mind she invites us in, opening her deep, rich reading of the 'sainted ones' of the centuries, making them be what they must be: ordinary men and women who lived lives near to God—with every possible heartache and hope. But that's the good gift of this book: it makes these saints be sinners like us, people who long for honest faith, honest hope, and honest love. Vintage Saints and Sinners is a book for the everyman and everywoman, pilgrims across the centuries that we are."
Christopher L. Heuertz
"The winsome brilliance of Karen Wright Marsh's ability to encapsulate gorgeous little vignettes of history's greatest contemplative mystics and fierce justice advocates makes Vintage Saints and Sinners a timely work. From the most spectacular to the uttermost undramatic conversions, each hero and shero Karen introduces highlights an embodied example of vocational fidelity that is both inspiring and inviting."
Soong-Chan Rah
"There are many times when Christian ministry—particularly activist ministries that pursue the full expression of the kingdom of God in the world—can be an arduous and lonely task. It can feel like we are the first ones to tread this territory. Karen Marsh looks back upon an important spiritual history. She offers important examples and role models who remind us that we are never alone when we pursue the fullness of the kingdom of God. If every activist Christian were to engage in a daily reading of this text and actually put into practice what is offered by these vintage Christians, Christianity could actually serve a healthier witness to the kingdom of God."
James K. A. Smith
"In our postmodern age, it's all the more important that Christians cultivate ancient friendships, apprenticing with broken and beautiful saints who've preceded us. Their lives of devotion, service, and sacrifice help us to reimagine our own. In this wise, humble, passionate book, Karen Marsh invites you to meet the ancient friends who have nourished her faith. It's a joyful, honest journey that will make you want to join this pilgrimage for yourself."
Tiffany Malloy
"Marsh gives us a glimpse into the lives of these well-known Christian thinkers and practical theologians, not from a purely biographical perspective, but through the lens of what she has learned from their lives."
David Dark
"Righteousness, we know, is endlessly complicated. In Vintage Saints and Sinners, Karen Marsh shows that it's also a living process, a communal drama of joy and liveliness into which we're invited. With wit, care, and deep lyricism, Karen helps us to see that saints—who are also always sinners—are on our side. Where we are, they've already been. We get to meet their messy witness with our own. One day at a time."
Curt Thompson
"There are few things in this world that more ably transform us than our encounters with real stories. Stories that tell of joy and shame. Of hope and anguish. Of the very hard work that leads to a world of goodness, beauty, and redemption—but not without the honest rendition of all the stumbling in the dark that necessarily accompanies such godly liberation. These are the stories that we so desperately need to hear, and they are the very stories that Karen Marsh has so thoughtfully given us with Vintage Saints and Sinners. Stories not only of the saints of clay feet who we all know about, but also the story that is her own, the one that ties all the others—the reader's not the least—into the grand narrative into which God is writing all who are willing to be included. If you want your hope to be strengthened, if you want your mind to be renewed, and if you want your story to be changed, look no further: this collection of stories is for you."
Library Journal
10/15/2017
Introduced as "an established bit of Christian choreography," this account from Marsh (director, Theological Horizons, Univ. of Virginia) shares disparate transformative Christian biographies as a way to reflect upon her own life. "As I've gotten up close to the personal stories of vintage Christians, I have met them in their humanity," she explains. In particular, the author highlights the spiritual substance of Saint Augustine, Ignatius of Loyola, Martin Luther, John Wesley, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. She adds to the mix recognizable spiritual writers such as Flannery O'Connor, C.S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, and Henri Nouwen, as well as lesser-known heroes, such as sharecropper-turned-civil rights activist and singer Fannie Lou Hamer and Nazi resister and martyr Sophie Scholl. Marsh thoughtfully presents their notable activities with care, and the assumption of reading simply for holiness and mastery of mystical contemplation is undone. Instead, this survey demonstrates that faith in action is what calls all Christians. Accompanying reading suggestions and "conversation starter" questions recommend this title to book groups. VERDICT A quiet journey into dynamic lives of faith.—SC
