{"id":6480,"date":"2006-08-17T09:22:08","date_gmt":"2006-08-17T09:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/soft-saints.html"},"modified":"2006-08-17T09:22:08","modified_gmt":"2006-08-17T09:22:08","slug":"soft-saints","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/soft-saints.html","title":{"rendered":"Soft Saints?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A piece on a popular product, with an interesting Catholic-business-related tidbit.<\/a><\/p>\n

Soft Saints are not cheap – $98\/apiece, but they are all handcrafted – the company’s originator employs mostly stay-at-home moms to do the doll construction.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

O’Toole’s decision to enter artisanship followed two years of caring for a cancer-stricken friend. When he died, she thought: "If I could change just one life, I would be grateful."<\/p>\n

She and her creative partner, Celeste Galanger, who lives in Oregon, decided that goal could best be achieved from the inside of their business out. The pair employ only stay-at-home moms to do any extra embroidery, sewing and assembly. O’Toole, a single mother who raised four boys, said she always wished she could have been home with her children.<\/p>\n

She’d never sculpted anything before sitting at her kitchen table one day with a wooden spoon and a wad of clay to mold her first head – St. Jerome, the cantankerous monk who translated parts of the Bible. Before she begins, O’Toole looks to history for inspiration and information, studying the saint’s life along with any images she can find, real or rendered. When she crafted St. Patrick, an abbot lent her his miter and staff. When working on St. Veronica, she met with a retired nun who had lived in Galilee.<\/p>\n

Recently, O’Toole set to work on the head of a Baby Jesus doll, which she planned to give away at Santa Ana’s St. Francis Home, the assisted living facility where her grandmother lives. She’d always noticed the nuns’ kindness toward Trotechaud, but when her grandmother fell ill a few months ago and her need for attention became greater, O’Toole’s appreciation grew.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And the tidbit?<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Plush religious toys are "definitely a trend, a very successful one," said Alan Napleton, founder of the Catholic Marketing Network, which promotes Catholic items such as statues, rosaries and, now, holy figures in miniature. New Catholic shops are cropping up each month, he said, and for the first time since the 1940s and ’50s, they’re gaining momentum in a business long led by evangelical Christians. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’m going to go out on a limb and say I find that very hard to believe, unless the shops are in parish church vestibules or online….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A piece on a popular product, with an interesting Catholic-business-related tidbit. Soft Saints are not cheap – $98\/apiece, but they are all handcrafted – the company’s originator employs mostly stay-at-home moms to do the doll construction. O’Toole’s decision to enter artisanship followed two years of caring for a cancer-stricken friend. When he died, she thought:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSoft Saints? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/soft-saints.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Soft Saints? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A piece on a popular product, with an interesting Catholic-business-related tidbit. Soft Saints are not cheap – $98\/apiece, but they are all handcrafted – the company’s originator employs mostly stay-at-home moms to do the doll construction. O’Toole’s decision to enter artisanship followed two years of caring for a cancer-stricken friend. When he died, she thought:…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/soft-saints.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2006-08-17T09:22:08+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Soft Saints? - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/soft-saints.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Soft Saints? - Via Media","og_description":"A piece on a popular product, with an interesting Catholic-business-related tidbit. Soft Saints are not cheap – $98\/apiece, but they are all handcrafted – the company’s originator employs mostly stay-at-home moms to do the doll construction. O’Toole’s decision to enter artisanship followed two years of caring for a cancer-stricken friend. When he died, she thought:…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/soft-saints.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2006-08-17T09:22:08+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/soft-saints.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/soft-saints.html","name":"Soft Saints? - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2006-08-17T09:22:08+00:00","dateModified":"2006-08-17T09:22:08+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/soft-saints.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/soft-saints.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/soft-saints.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Soft Saints?"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}