The Saint of Kathmandu: And Other Tales of the Sacred in Distant Lands Hardcover - 2008

Media reviews

In this remarkable book Sarah LeVine brings us into religious lives and cultural worlds portrayed with an immediacy, complexity, and intimacy so very different from 'textbook religion.' With her we enter into those borderlands of real encounter where we meet people who do not share our lived world and who ask us questions as penetrating and illumining as any we might ask of them.—Diana Eck, author of A New Religious America and Encountering God

"Sarah LeVine's The Saint of Kathmandu is a reader's delight. The author's fine gifts as a novelist combine here with her long experience as an ethnographer. The result is a lovely confluence of stories—each one vivid in detail, elegant in structure, beautiful in prose expression, and brimful of human understanding."—John Demos, author of The Enemy Within: Two Thousand Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World and The Unredeemed Captive

"This is a major work, the beginning of ongoing discussions about the role and impact of religion in multiple societies around the world. It fascinates and prods and disturbs and enlightens. Best of all, the book reads like a novel without losing a scintilla of academic credibility. My best advice: whatever you were going to read next, forget it. Read this book instead."—Joan Chittister, author of Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir

"The Saint of Kathmandu is rich, intense, utterly credible. The tales are deeply engaging, and reveal more about workaday religion that any standard approaches—perhaps because the author takes on individual dramas of suffering, enduring, growing. This is also the most global small book I can think of. Save for Nepal, I have traveled in or looked into religion in all six country-contexts which Sarah LeVine treats, American Zen not least. She is compellingly concrete; she evokes humility without rue; she emits wisdom without pride. An extraordinary feat of religious story telling."—Theodore Friend, author of Indonesian Destinies