Katherine Dugan (Edited By)
Katherine Dugan is Associate Professor of Religious Studies
at Springfield College in Western Massachusetts. She is the author
of Millennial Missionaries: How a Group of Young Catholics Is
Trying to Make Catholicism Cool (Oxford University Press,
2019).
Karen E. Park (Edited By)
Karen E. Park is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies
at St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wisconsin. She has written
widely on Marian devotion and shrines and American religion and
popular culture. She holds a PhD from the Divinity School of the
University of Chicago.
American Patroness is a remarkable and timely collection of essays
that reframe American religion through the histories, experiences,
politics, and imaginations of Marian shrines. Its essays go far
beyond documenting the existence of these material touchstones of
Catholic faith to demonstrate the richness of Catholic devotional
culture to the formation of American identities writ large. One
need not specialize in Catholic studies to benefit from the
volume's robust analyses of immigration, white supremacy, gender,
ritual, authority, and space and place. Like the shrines to Mary in
her many appearances across the United States, American Patroness
draws us in to the lived experiences of devotional practice and
embodied encounter that refuse our tidy categories of intellectual
analysis.---Rachel McBride Lindsey, Associate Professor of American
Religion and Culture and Director of Lived Religion in the Digital
Age, Saint Louis University
Marian shrines connect Catholics to each other and to a past
replete with meaning and emotion. American Patroness explores
twelve sites of Marian devotion, uncovering worlds of cultural,
ethnic, and creative variety. Reading American Patroness is like
taking a trip through American Catholic history, as witnessed by
those who devote themselves to the Virgin Mary and who call the
United States home.---Michael Pasquier, Professor Religious Studies
and History, Louisiana State University
American Patroness is beautiful in its multiplicity. This is much
more than a book on Marian shrines, it is a book that explores
Catholic devotion in its radical, conservative, and irreverent
registers. Here we find informal shrines made from murals and
underpasses, and shrines in their most triumphalist institutional
forms--each offering a different vision of what it means to be
Catholic in the US. Across these shrinescapes, Catholics work out
approaches to immigration, disability, reproductive politics and
gentrification. Shrines are no quaint remnants of a Catholic
devotional past, but a key, mutable resource for exploring the
contours of Catholicism in our contemporary world.---Alyssa
Maldonado-Estrada, author of Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and
Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of Marian
shrine devotionalism that I have read, and I urge everyone
interested in understanding the enduring power and persistence of
shrines devoted to the Virgin Mary to read this book. American
Patroness is an exciting and important new collection that features
top scholars of Catholicism who effectively translate the power and
beauty of belief, prayer, and community in shared and communal
spaces. Deeply researched and clearly written and excellent for
class use.---Kristy Nabhan-Warren, author of Meatpacking America:
How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland
American Patroness is a major contribution to the study of US
Catholicism and American religion. The helpful introduction and
vivid case studies offer surprising insights about the complexity
and vitality of devotion today, not only at traditional shrines but
also tourist sites, urban underpasses, and digital spaces.
Indispensable for specialists but of interest to everyone who wants
to know more about the contemporary religious landscape.---Thomas
A. Tweed, author of Religion: A Very Short Introduction
Mary tumbles into material existence at shrines throughout the
United States, where devotees celebrate her special powers to help
navigate their lives. In American Patroness, we finally have an
interdisciplinary collection of studies of Marian "shrinescapes,"
from old revered churches to new highway underpasses, in all their
endurance, adaptability, mess, and excess. Particularly wonderful
is the metaphor of "conversation" used by editors Katherine Dugan
and Karen E. Park--a theoretical innovation that invites us to
"start anywhere" in understanding places that "pile on" many
meanings, including multiple Marys. Anyone interested in US
religion will be lucky to tumble into this critical new analysis of
Mary's reach and importance in America. Start anywhere, but get in
on the conversation.---Julie Byrne, Msgr. Thomas J. Hartman Chair
of Catholic Studies at Hofstra University
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