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.
