"In this book, Katie Walker Grimes makes a clear-eyed, brilliant, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the failure of the Roman Catholic Church to understand virtue as the resistance to suffering and death, life as the embrace of power and struggle, and holiness as the rejection of slave-making, whether in the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries—and especially in the twenty-first!"

"Katie Walker Grimes uses the most powerful, provocative new theories of blackness to challenge the Catholic Church’s complicity in racial injustice. Taking as its guiding thread the lives of New World saints, this book probes the disgraceful entanglement of Christian individuals and institutions in slavery and its afterlives. Grimes offers an energizing new vision for religious engagement on racial justice issues as she calls for the figure of the fugitive to take center stage."

"For several years now, Katie Walker Grimes has been asking questions about the church’s advancement of antiblackness supremacy. Now she looks at its iconography and saint-making to demonstrate its 'participation in black chattel slavery and its ongoing Pan-American afterlife.' Grimes is a powerful writer whose provocative argument will not be easily accepted, but she has a case here and it has long needed a hearing. Read it and see for yourself. This is tough work by a very significant scholar."