Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them

by Robert A. Orsi

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.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, History, Catholic, Theory, Academic, Anthropology

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely one of the more encouraging religious studies/ theory books I’ve had to read for class. I really appreciated the balance he discussed and maintained within his own fieldwork in relating to practitioners of religion. Often the field can be so focused about maintaining a scientific/secular approach that it seems to belittle those practitioners accounts, but Orsi does take them seriously, all the while cognizant of the inherent limitations of issues with being a scholar of religion within a sect with which he was intimately familiar (he grew up in an Italian Catholic family and the bulk of the book includes vignettes into Catholic figures in his life in relation to Catholic figures he was studying). His understanding of religion within the academy in terms of relationships rather than fixed meanings was really helpful, and does well to blur the us/them divide between observer and observed. As he points out, when interviewing someone for their religious worldview, it becomes less taking notes than a comparison of them between observer and observed. Very good.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raises lots of interesting methodological questions for students of religious studies (and theology, to a lesser extent), plus fun stuff on mid-20th-century American Catholicism and the very nature of modernity. A great read whether you agree with his approaches or not.

[Iris Olwen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is really good and Orsi is a really good writer. Maybe I have just read too many of his books for various religion classes so I’m a little bit like “yes true I get it!” This one was super fun to read because it was built around his own family experiences. Chapters were a bit all over the place, but overall a great read that I actually think many people who are not in a religion class would enjoy!

[Rahma · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliantly written study of Catholic community in the contemporary US. This man is my current favorite in modern theories of religion. Combines graceful and engaging prose with captivating autobiography (the Prof comes from an Italian-American Catholic community in the Bronx)and profound theoretical reflections on "doing" comparative religion today.

[Blair Hodges · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book; describes, prescribes, and enacts. Loved it.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book should be required reading for anyone in a Religious Studies major as it addresses the inherent contradictions in the field, and the specific difficulties ethnographers face.

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 3 out of 5]

Occasionally a book both enlightens me and turns me into a forthright opponent of the author's thesis. Between Heaven and Earth is a loosely connected set of essays about religious experience among mid-twentieth-century, working-class Italian-American Catholics, which the author uses to develop the rubbery notion that religion is really about interconnections of worshipers with family members as well as with the objects of their worship. Therefore, concludes Orsi, scholars of religion ought to refrain from criticizing the superstition of their subjects.

Orsi writes well for a scholar. Although he includes enough academic jargon to mollify his peers, his autobiographical ruminations on the religious practices of his grandmother and Uncle Sal are thoughtful and clear. But the book is nonetheless depressing, a reminder to those of us who lived through the pre-Vatican II era in the United States of just how much gross superstition Roman Catholicism entertained and, in fact, encouraged. As for Orsi's thesis, the emperor has no clothes: worthless superstition is simply worthless superstition and has no redeeming value for either this world or the next.

[Ryan Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

By the end of this book, Orsi has some thought-provoking things to say about the nature of "religious studies" as an academic discipline and how academics may be misunderstanding the real nature of "religion" by imposing upon religion their own dichotomous view between 'good religion' and 'bad religion' (i.e. good = mainline Protestantism that is rationally understandable; bad = pretty much everything else). Orsi's approach in this book is to seek to understand 'presence'--devotees' relationship with the sacred in their lives in a real, meaningful, and even emotional way--through the experience of twentieth-century Catholics (including his own family).

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful, fascinating exploration of 20th century Catholicism, particularly as experienced by those old enough to remember the pre-Vatican II church, but living emphatically Catholic lives in a post-Vat II world. It’s also interesting to connect to this to my research, and to some of my past interests on the suffering self in medieval theology.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of those books that i read feeling like it was tailor-made for me. reflections on the methods of studying religion and engaging with the lived experiences of religious practitioners all with brilliant excerpts and examples from american religion in the 19th and 20th century.

[Annika · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an utterly fascinating book of essays about twentieth-century Catholicism and the field of religious studies as a whole. Anyone interested in religious studies or the history of religion should read it! The particular chapter topics and theses are interesting, but Orsi's style of writing and approach to religious studies is as much the argument as the book as the individual case studies. He is scholarly without being pretentious or inaccessible to a general audience. He never judges the views of the people he studies, and he's simultaneously open about his own background and how it might affect his scholarship. On a personal level, the chapters about disability and illness and his grandmother's relationship with Saint Gemma Galgani made me understand the historical roots of my mother and grandmother's views on suffering and "offering it up," views that I have simultaneously admired and lamented for years.

[Monica Mitri · Rating 5 out of 5]

At its core, Robert Orsi says, religion is “a web not of meanings but of [complex] relationships between heaven and earth,” (5) in which practitioners, saints and scholars participate. This web is formed and reformed by continuous interactions across religious and non-religious spaces, which make demarcating the two impossible. To study religious history is to recognize that it is intertwined, braided, and dynamic, and to realize that is best studied at the local scale. Religious history is a history of presence, experienced in material religious objects, human bodies, religious rituals, and the like. Presence “changes things, alters experience, reconfigures relationships, necessitates new maps for familiar landscapes” (72).
This view of religion opens up various theoretical, historical and ethnographical considerations that the religious scholar should take into account. Especially, Orsi argues that it breaks up numerous scholarly dichotomies: “good” and “bad” religion, practitioners and scholars, the living (practitioners) and the dead (saints), religious and non-religious spaces, spirituality and materiality, and of course the “Great Divide” (176): insider and outsider. The web negates “oppositional terms … [and represents] negotiating compromises that are often tragic in their inevitability” (4). It also challenges other scholarly myths like religious order and historical metanarratives. Orsi emphasizes that to study religion is to study presence amid life’s messiness and conflicting multiplicities.
Chapter five is on religious scholars studying their own traditions and standing at the blurry boundary between outsider and insider. Orsi reflects on his experience as a scholar at the shrine of St Jude, seeking to interpret practitioners’ experience. Is there any value he can present to them? Can he even understand them if he is not immersed in the same devotional practices? As a non-practicing Catholic, does he have access to their world? Is he an ambivalent outsider or insider? And as a scholar on this fuzzy boundary, how can he speak of lived religion as presence without espousing a confessional stance? Orsi answers that religious studies must be willing to problematize and cross the insider/outsider boundary – one constructed by our own writing on religion anyway. We should listen more closely to our sources and allow them to disrupt our academic complacency.
This classic book was an intellectual delight to read – both enlightening and troubling. It raises many questions for the religious scholar to ponder and struggle with. Orsi’s writing embodies his web of relationships; it glides smoothly and effortlessly between saints, living practitioners, self-reflection, theoretical analysis, and back. I foresee returning to it again and again as I navigate the religious studies terrain, straddling multiple worlds and putting them into words.

[Roland Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Between Heaven and Earth (2005) is the most autobiographical of Robert Orsi’s books. He uses stories of the religious beliefs and practices of his family to explore American Catholicism in the mid-twentieth century. Having such intimate knowledge of his subjects allows Orsi to present them in all their humanity, and he makes an effort to emphasize complexity and paradox rather than making simple arguments. In compelling prose, Orsi tells the story of his uncle, Sal Cavallaro, who was crippled by cerebal palsy his entire life. Mid-century Catholicism reveled in “a darkly erotic aesthetic of pain,” Orsi argues, and he reflects on the way that people treated his uncle and his uncle’s disabled friends as saints provided that they never complained about their pain and always made life pleasant for those around them. These Catholics called sick people blessed because they had the chance to atone for their sins through pain. Orsi reflects that “in its insistence on the innocence, nearness to heaven, purity of heart, and resilient cheerfulness of handicapped people, the fantasy drained away the lived reality of their days.” People like Sal had little respect for such a view of sickness. Instead, he turned to the Blessed Margaret of Castello as his patron saint. Margaret (who has never been canonized), was born in 1287 as a dwarf, with a twisted foot and a hunchback. “She wouldn’t have been born today,” Sal insists, “she would have been an abortion.” Orsi argues that “through the crippled saint, Sally momentarily breached the otherness constituted for him by the same devotional culture that gave him Margaret. … Margaret’s holiness became a sign of his own presence. If there was someone up in heaven like him, Sal taught me, then people like him could be recognized on earth. In heaven and on earth, Margaret subverts the narrative of the holy cripple, and this may be why she will not be admitted into the ranks of the saints.”

Read my full review here: http://wordsbecamebooks.com/2015/07/1...

[Mel]

Read Chapter 5, "'Have You Ever Prayed to Saint Jude?' Reflections on Fieldwork in Catholic Chicago" for Theories & Methods. I really want to read the rest of the book sometime in the future.

"The consequences of all this for our work is that unless we recognize first the elemental fascination and power of religious goings-on and then all the things we want to do with them--share them, control them, mute their power over us and over our memories--our writing about religion will become an exercise in boundary making. This is the emotional ground of the impulse toward functionalism in the field: to tame what is wild and threatening and dangerous specifically to us because of the details of our particular childhoods about different forms of religious experience and practice. This is what makes so much religious scholarship dull and beside the point. It is also the reason why scholars of religion spend so much time in making sterile taxonomies, gridding what we study into safe--and discrete--categories. These various complex anxieties, needs, and discomforts constitute the existential difficulties of fieldwork in one's own religious tradition" (161).

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Through Catholic experiences of the world, Orsi provides a new perspetive about methodological questions of the study of religion. He examines the place of the scholar in their studies and suggets that scholars begin to recognize their place in the web of interhuman relations and take responsibilty for the repercussions of their study. Orsi's braided narrative style is refreshing compared to the typical absent authors.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this not so much for the stories, but for the approach that Orsi has taken in writing it. Perhaps the first book I have read by an academic that is written to appeal to not just academics, but those also outside the academia world. Just as the title suggests, this is more about the consequences that come with choosing to follow faith, rather than the faith itself.

[William Ramsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Provoking and unorthodox for the field, this books seems far less concerned with discoursing analysis or merely reporting truth claims (never daring to evaluate one), and instead focuses on how humans relate and experience something sacred.