Robert A. Orsi

Thinking about religion, belief, and politics

Since the closing decade of the millennium, social friction generated by the presence of substantial numbers of Muslim immigrants in Europe, as well as the threat of Muslim terrorists, has given a new impetus to the fear of politicized religion. Violent and intolerant “Fundamentalist movements “ have emerged not only in the Muslim world (although these are the most frightening in the West) but also in Israel and the United States. The secular values of liberal democracy are under siege – or so the Western media tell us. Academics who teach religious studies have responded eagerly, seeing in this an opportunity to demonstrate the public relevance of their expertise. What is to be done about the dangers of religious belief to liberal democracies? More generally one may ask: What are the relations between the secular promise of liberal democracy and the conditions for private belief in transcendence? There is no simple answer to this question, of course, because modern religion has both hindered and aided liberal values and because liberal values are more contradictory and ambiguous than is sometimes acknowledged. But I want to begin with other questions: What is “religion”? How has it come to be defined in the ways it has? What are some of the political consequences of making belief central to the definition?

Divine mirrors : the Virgin Mary in the visual arts

Part I Essays: Robert Orsi, The Many Names of the Mother of God Melissa R. Katz, Regarding Mary - Womens Lives Reflected in Marys Image. Part II Other Voices: Mary R. Lefkowitz: Mary and the ancient Goddesses Sharon K. Elkins, Mary in the Christian Tradition Claire Fontijn-Harris, The Virgins Voice - Representations of Mary in 17th-Century Italian Song Ifeanyi Anthony Menkiti, In a Corner of Africa - Reflections on the Virgin Mary. Part III Catalogue Entries. Part IV Checklist of Works of Art with Marian Themes in the Collection of the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College.

Snakes Alive: Resituating the Moral in the Study of Religion

At the end of a compelling account of his two-year sojourn among snake-handling Christians in southern Appalachia, Dennis Covington, a Georgia-based reporter for the New York Times, describes the night he realized that he could not join the handlers, whom he had come to love and respect, in their faith. I want to borrow this instance of one man’s discovery of radical religious otherness—a discovery that led him to turn away in sorrow and disappointment from his friends—as an opening onto the question of what a renewed emphasis on moral inquiry might mean for the academic study of religion.

The problem of the holy

Holiness is the great word in religion; it is even more essential than the notion of God. Nathan Soderblom What is the subject of our thought? Experience! Nothing else! And if we lose the ground of experience then we get into all kinds of theories. Hannah Arendt INTRODUCTION Many (not all) scholars of religion become restive sooner or later with the simple sufficiency of explanations of religious phenomena and experiences in terms of the social and psychological. It is not that these scholars of religion propose foregoing social explanations. It is that they recognize that such accounts fall short of the realness of the phenomena they purport to describe and explain in peoples experience. And not just this: social accounts that pretend to be exhaustive distort those experiences and diminish them, precisely as historical and cultural phenomena. Such explanations are empirically insufficient, in other words. The famous epistemic “bracket” of religious studies, which is the practice of setting aside questions about the ontological realness of religious phenomena as a condition of research – we are not interested in whether or not the Blessed Mother really appeared to Bernadette at Lourdes, we say, thus immediately making the seer into a psychotic – begins to seem false or inadequate. These scholars have witnessed something in their fieldwork or historical study, close to home and across the globe, which they want to name and without which theories of religion seem to be beside the point. They have seen, for example, how Jesus is a real figure in a Pentecostal womans everyday experience, as real to her as the other people around her, as real as her kitchen table and her arthritis. She does not “believe in” Jesus. Jesus is present to her. Moreover, this woman’s Jesus has an existence that is greater than the sum of her intentions, desires, needs, hopes, and fears, and that cannot be completely accounted for with reference to her social circumstances. He has a life of his own in her life.

The text and the world

INTRODUCTION In 1455, King Tilokaraja of Chiang Mai, a northern kingdom in what we now know as Thailand, began to build a new Buddhist temple in imitation of the Maha Bodhi temple at Bodh Gaya (India), which marks the site of Sakyamuni Buddha‘s enlightenment. After first installing a bodhi tree – a devotional reminder of the Buddha‘s enlightenment – transferred from one of Chiang Mais most powerful existing Buddhist sites, Tilokaraja continued to sponsor work at the new temple for years to come. Spaces for the veneration of Sakyamuni Buddha were constructed, along with a pavilion for the recitation of Buddhist texts and a monastic library. This temple in Chiang Mai, the Seven Spires Monastery, later housed a large gathering of Buddhist monks invited by the king to purify and recite the contents of canonical Buddhist texts. The labor, wealth, and royal support required for this temple and its editorial assembly, as well as the importance of both to subsequent Thai Buddhist memory, remind us that the texts central to religious traditions and communities of practitioners are – and long have been – alive in the world. Such texts are performed in liturgy and ritual. They are references used in sophisticated intellectual debate, as well as tools for basic education. Celebrated within religious communities, texts also shape the world of material culture, guiding the creation of statues and paintings and providing descriptive models for the construction of spaces for ritual and devotion. Those books or manuscripts deemed transformatively powerful are drawn into the work of magic and protective ritual. To possess religious texts, or to support their production, is often (especially in a manuscript culture) a display of wealth and power.

The cult of the saints and the reimagination of the space and time of sickness in twentieth-century American Catholicism.

Devotion to the saints has been an essential component of the Catholic experience of sickness and suffering for centuries.1 Statues of the saints stand on the bedside tables of the sick and holy images are affixed to the walls above their heads, relics are pinned to their bedclothes by desperate kin, candles are lit for them, they are bathed in holy water and carried to healing shrines. Despite the familiarity of these practices, however, or perhaps because of it, the role of the popular cult of the saints in mediating the Catholic experience of sickness has received little careful attention.

The look of the sacred

Whatever else it means, to see or be seen is to enter into a relationship, even if doing so involves practices as different as ignoring those who glare at us, returning the gaze of a lover, or cherishing the photograph of a lost family member. Different as they are, each of these behaviors is an example of the many kinds of relatedness that constitute interaction with images. I say “interaction” because it becomes clear upon inspection that a viewers action toward objects, images, or people is often far more than unilateral. Each looks back; sometimes they even see us before we see them. Of special interest here is how images of the living and the dead, of gods, or of mythic heroes connect to the viewers body. Seeing bridges the gap separating seer and seen, connecting the two in some way. Representation vanishes in the way that a tool in ones hand fades from consciousness as a sign in the midst of using it. Before use, the tool only signifies what it might actually do. In use, the tool ceases to be separate from the body and becomes instead a physical extension of it. Likewise, when they join viewers to those they love, fear, or hate, images are organic projections of the eyes, material forms of beholding. It is this tangible look, the look of the sacred, that reveals the role of the body in vision, and that will be the subject of this chapter.

The Fault of Memory

Conflict in immigrant communities between parents and children over the right way to live is cast in the idioms of geography. Immigrants tell their children stories about the place they left as a display of their deepest values and understanding of the world. This article explores the nature of this interaction in New Yorks largest Italian community, Italian Harlem, during a period of significant intergenerational tension. Most scholars of Italian America have suggested that the younger generation turned away from the traditions of their parents in favor of American styles and values. The article challenges this notion of tradition, maintaining instead that the articulation of a “tradition” is a complex cultural process which does not discover, but creates, the past in response to the needs and dilemmas of the present. “Southern Italy” was presented to younger Italian-Americans in such a way as to exclude them. An understanding of this often bitter intergenerational tension must be integrated into histories of the Italian-American family.

Every question is open: Looking for paths beyond the clearing

However challenging scholars of religion find it to talk across their respective subfields, they are responsible for doing so in order to consider future trajectories for research in religious studies. This contribution to the symposium considers what a 2014 seminar of younger scholars of religion see as urgent problems and issues in religious studies today in order to open a conversation about what is left of religion after “religion.” How do we approach the lived religious practices of men and women in particular times and places after the historical deconstruction of “religion” as the object of scholarly inquiry from modernity to the present? Do scholars of religion in the humanities, on one hand, and sociologists of religion, on the other, recognize their respective subfields in this discussion of problems and questions? This article is offered as a diagnostic to chart the fault lines between divergent methods and theories.

Religious criticism, secular critique, and the “critical study of religion”: lessons from the study of Islam

Over the past several years, a number of scholars have diagnosed a crisis in the field of the study of religion. Unlike previous debates within religious studies, this recent crisis has focused not so much on the object of study but on both the relationship of the researcher to his or her subject and the nature of research we as “critical scholars of religion” should conduct. Institutional and professional anxieties over the legitimacy of the field of religious studies within the broader academy have intensified the urgency of this debate. Above all, the dividing line between scientific scholarship and metaphysical speculation is increasingly drawn around the ill-defined notion of critique. As Jose Cabezon has cogently observed, “It is our commitment to a project defined … in terms of criticism, methodological rigor, theory, self-awareness and so forth – that we believe gives us … the wherewithal to clarify the opacities and to unmask the misrecognitions that are [supposedly] endemic to the first-order discourses and practices of religion that are constitutive of both our object and our Other.” The establishment of something called the critical study of religion, as opposed to theological assertion or parochial apologetics, has become the primary justification for the place of scholars of religion within the academy.