Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity?

In Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity?, Gëzim Alpion explored the significance of Mother Teresa to the mass media, to celebrity culture, to the Church, and to various political and national groups. Drawing on new research on Mother Teresa's early years, Alpion charted her rise to fame, investigating the celebrity discourse in which a nun was turned into a media and humanitarian icon. The book talks about the cultural and critical analysis of Mother Teresa and the way she and others created, promoted, and censored her public image in the context of the sociology of fame, media, religion, and nationality. One section explores the ways different vested interests sought to appropriate the nun after her death, and also examines Mother Teresa's own attitude to her childhood and to the Balkan conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s.^[5]

Referring to Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity?, Stephen Schwartz holds that "in its depth, breadth, and seriousness", this monograph "may stand for some time to come as the single most important biography of Mother Teresa in English".^[6] In his review of the book which appeared in the American Communication Journal, Marvin Williams contends that

Alpion’s examination of Mother Teresa’s celebrity is a case study of corporate identity management in today’s global media environment. His weaving of primary texts into the setting of this character piece creates a comprehensive cross-cultural examination that has the potential to become a new archetypal work of this mercurial personality.^[7]

• Alpion, Gëzim. 'Oh! not Calcutta' The Guardian, 6 September 2003.
• Arnot, Chris. 'Sinners and winners'. The Guardian, 1 November 2005.
• Lipsett, Anthea. 'Gëzim Alpion: Speaking for the refugee in us all'. Times Higher Education, 3 February 2006.
• Spink, Kathryn. 'Baffled by enigma of sancity'. The Tablet, 6 January 2007.
• Derbyshire, Stuart. 'Mother Teresa and the ‘me, me, me’ culture'. Spiked Magazine, 14 February 2007.
• Neuhaus, Richard John. 'T. S. Eliot, Mother Teresa, and the Children of Darkness'. First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture and Public Life, New York, 23 February 2007.
• Liaugminas, Sheila. 'Trashing the icon of altruism'. MercatorNet, 27 February 2007.
• Byrne, Lavinia. 'Famous by her own design'. Church Times, London, 3 April 2007.
• Schwartz, Stephen 'Review of Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity?'. Illyria, New York, 19 September 2007.
• Alpion, Gëzim. 'Understanding Mother Teresa’s Vocation and Migration'. Migrant Woman magazine, London, 27 September 2014.