Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make
ong>ISong>BN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Orsi, Robert A., PUBLong>ISong>HER: Princeton University Press, "Between ong>Heavenong> and Earth" explores the relationships men, women, and children have formed with the Virgin Mary and the saints in twentieth-century American Catholic hong>isong>tory, 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 thong>isong> boldly argued and beautifully written book, Robert Orsi also considers how scholars of religion occupy the ground in between belief and analysong>isong>, faith and scholarship. Orsi infuses hong>isong> analysong>isong> with an autobiographical voice steeped in hong>isong> own Italian-American Catholic background--from the devotion of hong>isong> uncle Sal, who had cerebral palsy, to a "crippled saint," Margaret of Castello; to the bond of hong>isong> Tuscan grandmother with Saint Gemma Galgani. Religion exong>isong>ts not as a medium of making meanings, Orsi maintains, but as a network of relationships between ong>heavenong> 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 dong>isong>tinctions 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. Thong>isong> book ong>isong> a brilliant critical inquiry into the lives that people make, for better or worse, between ong>heavenong> and earth, and into the ways scholars of religion could better study of these worlds.