Between Heaven and Earth

Bob Orsi, master of the religious local and intimate, pulls us further into the world of pre-Vatican II Italian-American Catholicism. Here, we meet the religious world closest to his own memory, the sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, circle of Orsi's own family. There, that “network of relationships between heaven and earth”—between the saints and those devoted to them—that fixes Orsi's attention. In chapter after chapter, Orsi in effect drives home the thesis that religion itself ought to be conceived as something offering “practitioners opportunities to form deep ties with saints, ancestors, demons, gods, ghosts, and other special beings in whose company humans work on the world and themselves” (2). Religion is not then just “morality tinged with feeling,” and even less “belief” or “theology.” Religion, or at least a good portion thereof, is relationship, and relationship in which supernatural beings are held to have a real “presence” in the lives of the living.

Art · Earth (classical element) · Epistemology · Feeling · Heaven · Literature · Morality · Sensibility · Sociology · Theology · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History of Science and Medicine · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

• Mind and mood in the study of religion

  James W Laine•Religion•2010

  Add to list