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

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.

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.

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.

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