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

doi:10.5860/choice.43-0264

September 1, 2005Choice Reviews Online

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

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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.

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Implication

Qualitative ethnography examines lived devotional practices in American Catholicism, highlighting how material culture and relationships shape religious experience.

Abstract

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix INTRODUCTION: Jesus Held Him So Close in His Love for Him That He Left the Marks of His Passion on His Body 1 CHAPTER ONE: Mildred, Is It Fun to Be a Cripple?The Culture of Suffering in Mid-Twentieth Century American Catholicism 19 CHAPTER TWO: The Many Names of the Mother of God 48 CHAPTER THREE: Material Children: Making God's Presence Real for Catholic Boys and Girls and for the Adults in Relation to Them 73 CHAPTER FOUR: Two Aspects of One Life: Saint Gemma Galgani and My Grandmother in the Wound between Devotion and History, the Natural and the Supernatural 110 CHAPTER FIVE: Have You Ever Prayed to Saint Jude? Reflections on Fieldwork in Catholic Chicago 146 CHAPTER SIX: Snakes Alive: Religious Studies between Heaven and Earth 177 NOTES 205 INDEX 241

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synapsesocial.com/papers/6a0c6a203b45b6e80888714b https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-0264

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

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

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