Between Heaven and Earth: the religious worlds people make and the scholars who study them

Key Points

• Investigate how ordinary people construct their religious worlds through material practices, devotional relationships, and bodily experiences in twentieth-century American Catholicism.
• Conducted ethnographic fieldwork and historical analyses focusing on twentieth-century Catholic communities, devotional shrines, and family practices in Chicago and broader American contexts.
• Analyzed material religion, personal testimonies, cultural narratives of illness and suffering, and practices surrounding saints and Marian devotion.
• Demonstrated that lived religion operates as an active, relational engagement between humans and sacred figures through physical objects, embodied suffering, and shared social practices.
• Identified critical tensions between academic historiography and devotional reality, illustrating how believers continually bridge the divide between the natural and supernatural.