This essay responds to John McDermott’s 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 James’s 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 Colella’s recent political description of the saint as the “strenuous citizen.”

这篇文章回应了约翰麦克德莫特对美国政治和宗教生活的诊断：“[B] 传统的政治和宗教机构不再是庆祝语言的充足资源，更不用说丰富的资源了。” 我通过阅读威廉·詹姆斯在《宗教经验的多样性》中对圣洁的描述来呈现一种新的庆祝语言. 詹姆斯为我提供了使圣洁归化和民主化的资源。这位务实的圣人因其超然的奇迹而不是通过她的世俗能量和实验而与众不同，她通过庆祝重新塑造了她的社区体验，这是一种在从事艺术中体现的欣赏和批评形式。因此，我对圣人的伦理和美学描述建立在 E. Paul Colella 最近将圣人描述为“努力的公民”的政治描述之上。