The Poverty of Riches: St. Francis of Assisi Reconsidered by Kenneth Baxter Wolf

Saint Francis of Assisi is arguably the main appealing saint ever produced via the Catholic Church. The strangely excessive regard with which he's held has served to insulate him from any actual feedback of the type of sanctity that he embodied: sanctity dependent before everything on his planned pursuit of poverty. during this ebook, Kenneth Baxter Wolf takes a clean examine Francis and the assumption of voluntary poverty as a foundation for Christian perfection. Wolf's element of departure is a sequence of easy yet hitherto unasked questions on the suitable nature of Francis's poverty: How did he cross approximately remodeling himself from a wealthy guy to a negative one? How winning was once this modification? How did his self-imposed poverty evaluate to the involuntary poverty of these he met in and round Assisi? What did negative humans of this kind get out in their touch with Francis? What did Francis get out of his touch with them? Wolf unearths that whereas Francis's perception of poverty as a non secular self-discipline can have opened the door to salvation for prosperous Christians like himself, it successfully precluded the concept the bad may possibly use their very own involuntary poverty as a route to heaven. in accordance with a radical reconsideration of the earliest biographies of the saint, in addition to Francis's personal writings, Wolf's paintings sheds very important new mild at the inherent ironies of poverty as a religious self-discipline and its dating to poverty as a socio-economic affliction.