Harvard Divinity School professor Orsi, the reigning scholar of American Catholicism, brings together six essays about religion and the methodology of its study. Orsi (The Madonna of 115th Street
and Thank You, St. Jude
) has always explored "lived religion," investigating the ways real people practice religion and how religious meaning suffuses their daily lives. That trademark interest marks these essays through and through—we learn about how the stories of saints and the stories of families intersect to make a "domestic hagiography," how children play a special role in families' and churches' understandings of spirituality and why people hang plastic Virgin Marys from the dashboard mirrors of their cars. Orsi interweaves these academic explorations with reflections on his own family: we read about his grandmother's devotion to Saint Gemma, his palsied uncle's faithful attendance at special Masses and breakfasts for Catholic "cripples" and his own experience conversing with a Haitian spiritualist and deity. Orsi has not written a memoir, per se, but has rather found in his own family a rich archive, full of religious experiences that tell stories about the extraordinary meanings ordinary people create in their lives. The fact that these essays exhibit an explicitly methodological, theoretical bent will guarantee that this book sells primarily to academic audiences, but it will do brilliantly there. (Jan.)
