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

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Orsi's book is an interesting intro to some of the issues facing religious studies scholars. It presents the issues of how to study a religious community and what difficulties arise in doing so. For the reader less interested in the academic field of religious studies, there is still a wealth of information on religion in America, especially the history and development of American Catholicism.

The book is accessible to a wide audience and is the kind of work that makes for good dicussions with a variety of different types of groups. I will add, however, that for those who are already sufficiently aware of the problems of doing anthropological research on religious communities, it offers little that is new or insightful.

This book is written by an academic for an academic audience, but I think it is a rare example of eloquent academic writing that is accessible and at times very touching, weaving in and out between the writer's personal history and more theoretical observations on the place of the people who study religion.

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 satisfy his peers, his autobiographical ruminations on the religious practices of his grandmother and Uncle Sal are thoughtful, clear, and full of understanding. 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.