Robert A. Orsi

Honorable Mention, PROSE Award A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year A Junto Favorite Book of the Year Beginning with metaphysical debates in the sixteenth century over the nature of Christ’s presence in the host, the distinguished historian and scholar of religion Robert Orsi imagines an alternative to the future of religion that early moderns proclaimed was inevitable. “This book is classic Orsi: careful, layered, humane, and subtle... If reformed theology has led to the gods’ ostensible absence in modern religion, History and Presence is a sort of counter-reformation literature that revels in the excesses of divine materiality: the contradictions, the redundancies, the scrambling of borders between the sacred and profane, the dead and the living, the past and the present, the original and the imitator...History and Presence is a thought-provoking, expertly arranged tour of precisely those abundant, excessive phenomena which scholars have historically found so difficult to think.” —Sonja Anderson, Reading Religion “With reference to Marian apparitions, the cult of the saints and other divine–human encounters, Orsi constructs a theory of presence for the study of contemporary religion and history. Many interviews with individuals devoted to particular saints and relics are included in this fascinating study of how people process what they believe.” —Catholic Herald

History and Presence

Between Heaven and Earth explores the relationships men, women, and children have formed with the Virgin Mary and the saints in twentieth-century American Catholic history, and reflects, more broadly, on how people live in the company of sacred figures and how these relationships shape the ties between people on earth. In this boldly argued and beautifully written book, Robert Orsi also considers how scholars of religion occupy the ground in between belief and analysis, faith and scholarship. Orsi infuses his analysis with an autobiographical voice steeped in his own Italian-American Catholic background--from the devotion of his uncle Sal, who had cerebral palsy, to a "crippled saint," Margaret of Castello; to the bond of his Tuscan grandmother with Saint Gemma Galgani. Religion exists not as a medium of making meanings, Orsi maintains, but as a network of relationships between heaven and earth involving people of all ages as well as the many sacred figures they hold dear. Orsi argues that modern academic theorizing about religion has long sanctioned dubious distinctions between "good" or "real" religious expression on the one hand and "bad" or "bogus" religion on the other, which marginalize these everyday relationships with sacred figures. This book is a brilliant critical inquiry into the lives that people make, for better or worse, between heaven and earth, and into the ways scholars of religion could better study of these worlds.

The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them

Between Heaven and Earth

The prize-winning story of American women's devotion to St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes. Robert Orsi examines St. Jude's rise to national popularity, beginning in Chicago in 1929, when the daughters and granddaughters of Catholic immigrants called on the saint to help them during the tumultuous years of depression, war, and changing family lives. 14 illustrations.

Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes

Thank You, St. Jude

A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Robert A. Orsi's classic study of popular religion in Italian Harlem. In a new preface, Orsi discusses significant shifts in the field of religious history and calls for new ways of empirically studying divine presences in human life. "The Madonna of 115th Street has over the last quarter century become a classic of American religious history. There are few books that I have enjoyed teaching more over the years and even fewer that have taught me as much about American Catholic history."—Leigh E. Schmidt, author of Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment

Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950

The Madonna of 115th Street

Melissa R. Katz

Through a unique, stunning visual collection of paintings, sculptures, rare books, and works on paper, "Divine Mirrors" examines the relationship between sacred imagery and worldly identity. In addition to featuring such blockbuster artists as Mantegna, Munch and Leger, this book highlights little-known works of art.

The Virgin Mary in the Visual Arts

Divine Mirrors

"One of the greatest sources of violence in modern history has been the question of what Jesus meant when he told his disciples at the Last Supper to eat the bread of his body and drink the wine of his blood and to do so always in remembrance of him. It erupted in Europe in the sixteenth century and was carried around the globe by colonizers, missionaries, explorers, and scholars. In its opening chapters, History and Presence examines the power of this question in modernity, arguing that it shaped how religion itself as the object of critical scholarly inquiry came to be understood. The experience of the gods really present was consigned to the premodern, first in the figure of the Catholic, then elaborated as the heuristic for the religions of "primitives," dark-skinned people, women, children, the poor, both in the metropolitan centers of an ever-changing Europe and in its colonies. The distinction between those who live with the gods really present and others who do not retains broad normative force even today, evident, for example, in hierarchical models of psychological health and human maturity. Orsi goes on to ask what if the gods were restored to 'religion'? Using case studies drawn from Catholic devotional practices Orsi examines the relationships men and women form with supernatural beings and the consequences of these bonds for everyday life."--Provided by publisher.

History and presence

Kathleen Sprows Cummings

Timothy Matovina

Debates about the meaning of Vatican II and its role in modern Catholic and global history have largely focused on close theological study of its authoritative documents. This volume of newly commissioned essays contends that the historical significance of the council is best examined where these messages encountered the particular circumstances of the modern world: in local dioceses around the world. Each author examines the social, political, and domestic circumstances of a diocese, asking how they produced a distinctive lived experience of the Council and its aftermath. How did the Council change relationships and institutions? What was it like for laymen and women, for clergy, for nuns, for powerful first-world dioceses and for those in what we now know as the global south? A comparative reading of these chapters affords insights into these dimensions of Vatican II, and will spark a new generation of research into the history of 20th century Catholicism as both international and local.

Local Histories of a Global Event

Catholics in the Vatican II Era

"Fascinating insights into modern urban religious practice make Orsi's collection a must-read." -- Publishers Weekly "The essays provide insight into the cultural creativity, reinterpretation of worship and religious ingenuity of city people over the last 50 years." -- Library Journal "At last, a major dissection of the great mystery in modern Americanlife -- how religion and spirituality prospered amidst industrialization,urbanization, and rampant technological change after 1880!" -- Jon Butler, Yale University "Urban religion" strikes many as an oxymoron. How can religion thrive in the alienated, secular, fast-paced, and materialistic world of the modern, Western city? The authors in this collection believe that cities not only can provide the settings for religious expression, but also are material to the experiences which give rise to those religious expressions. In this book, they explore the distinctly urban forms of religious experience and practice that have developed in relation to the spaces, social conditions, and history of American cities.

Religion and the American Urban Landscape

Gods of the City

Informative and provocative, this book introduces readers to debates in the contemporary study of religion and suggests future research possibilities.

Robert A. Orsi

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