Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them
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Book Overview
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.Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:069112776X
ISBN13:9780691127767
Release Date:November 2006
Publisher:Princeton University Press
Length:264 Pages
Weight:0.87 lbs.
Dimensions:0.6" x 6.3" x 9.2"
Customer Reviews
2 ratings
Great book
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 16 years ago
This book is written by an academic for an academic audience, but I think it is a rare example of eloquent academic writing that is accessible and at times very touching, weaving in and out between the writer's personal history and more theoretical observations on the place of the people who study religion.
Interesting, easy read
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 17 years ago
Orsi's book is an interesting intro to some of the issues facing religious studies scholars. It presents the issues of how to study a religious community and what difficulties arise in doing so. For the reader less interested in the academic field of religious studies, there is still a wealth of information on religion in America, especially the history and development of American Catholicism. The book is accessible to a wide audience and is the kind of work that makes for good dicussions with a variety of different types of groups. I will add, however, that for those who are already sufficiently aware of the problems of doing anthropological research on religious communities, it offers little that is new or insightful.
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