Video: Patricia Appelbaum on St. Francis, America’s Most Popular Saint

Patricia Appelbaum, author of St. Francis of America: How a Thirteenth-Century Friar Became America’s Most Popular Saint, talks to Peggy Bendroth as part of the History Matters series at the Congregational Library and Archives.

In the following video, Appelbaum shares how St. Francis has become an enduring part of twenty-first century America.

Patricia Appelbaum, an independent scholar of religion and American culture, is author of St. Francis of America: How a Thirteenth-Century Friar Became America’s Most Popular Saint and Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture between World War I and the Vietnam Era.

To keep up with the author’s encounters with St. Francis of America, follow her website St. Francis Sightings. For posts by Appelbaum on the UNC Press blog, see “Pope Francis and the 1967 Theologians” and “Protestant Blessings and Cultural Change.”