Robert A. Orsi is Professor of Religious Studies and History and Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern University.
This book is classic Orsi: careful, layered, humane, and subtle… If
reformed theology has led to the gods’ ostensible absence in modern
religion, History and Presence is a sort of counter-reformation
literature that revels in the excesses of divine materiality: the
contradictions, the redundancies, the scrambling of borders between
the sacred and profane, the dead and the living, the past and the
present, the original and the imitator… History and Presence is a
thought-provoking, expertly arranged tour of precisely those
abundant, excessive phenomena which scholars have historically
found so difficult to think.
*Reading Religion*
Perhaps the heart of [Orsi’s] genius for writing about religion
lies in his deft balance of the individual person and the
encompassing dynamics of national and international history… Many,
I suspect, will applaud Orsi’s effort at pushing back on the
epistemological presumptions of modernity, in part at least because
doing so opens the way for a fuller recognition of materiality, of
the troubling bodies and substances, images, and efficacious things
that act on devotees with a force to be reckoned.
*Material Religion*
With reference to Marian apparitions, the cult of the saints, and
other divine–human encounters, Orsi constructs a theory of presence
for the study of contemporary religion and history. Many interviews
with individuals devoted to particular saints and relics are
included in this fascinating study of how people process what they
believe.
*Catholic Herald*
Orsi’s evoking of the full reality of the holy in the world is
extremely moving, shot through with wonder and horror. Speaking of
the sanctuary at Chimayo—which the present reviewer has also
visited—Orsi rejects trauma theory. The well of earth is not a
‘metaphor for suffering,’ a ‘hole in the mind’ where suffering
spills out; instead, ‘the seeming emptiness is in fact full’; the
hole is paradoxical; Christ is present in the dirt… There is much
that is specifically Catholic about the horrors and glories that
Orsi sets out in such carefully researched detail. His argument in
a short epilogue that we should see all religious history through a
matrix of presence is, nonetheless, convincing.
*Common Knowledge*
[A] compelling ethnography…Orsi shows that the history of presence
includes belief and doubt, anger and awe…Ultimately, this book is
meant as a manifesto for historians of religion more broadly…Orsi’s
history of a stereotype serves an important purpose, as it
rehabilitates the miracle of divine presence in our own histories
of religion.
*Marginalia*
A fiercely inquisitive book on the heart of Roman Catholicism… The
bulk of History and Presence concentrates on…the perception
phenomenon at the back of worldwide cults of saints’ relics, holy
shrines, saints’ cults, apparitions of Mary, and the like. Through
very nimble and wide-ranging research, Orsi lays bare the complex
intermingling of faith and psychology that has been a key element
of Catholicism for five hundred years. One of the persistent
strengths of the book is its keen awareness of the day-to-day
meaning of its mysteries for the ordinary people involved.
*Open Letters Monthly*
[A] brilliant, theologically sophisticated exploration of the
Catholic experience of God’s presence through the material world…
On every level—from its sympathetic, honest, and sometimes moving
ethnography to its astute analytical observations—this book is a
scholarly masterpiece.
*Choice*
Orsi recaptures God’s breaking into the world through stories that
range from tales of saints, such as Bernadette, to common people
who directly experienced divine intervention… The book does an
excellent job of explaining both the difficulties and values
inherent in recognizing God in the world.
*Publishers Weekly*
This is a meticulously researched, humane, and deeply challenging
book. It concerns the people and the groups for whom heaven and
earth, life and death are not separated by absolute boundaries.
‘Gods’ (to use Orsi’s term) cross these boundaries. Christ, the
Virgin Mary, saints, and the beloved dead remain real presences to
many, in a modern world that finds no place for them. The story is
set against the background of postwar American Catholicism. It has
searing moments of desperate hope and unexpected comfort. It also
has moments of sheer horror—as when Orsi explores what sexual
harassment by priests means to those who saw in priests human
gateways to heaven. The men and women studied in this book do not
belong to ‘a world we have lost.’ They belong to a world we have
lost sight of.
*Peter Brown, Princeton University*
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