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History and Presence by Robert A. Orsi (2016, Hardcover)
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About this product
Product Identifiers
PublisherHarvard University Press
ISBN-100674047893
ISBN-139780674047891
eBay Product ID (ePID)219060021
Product Key Features
Number of Pages377 Pages
Publication NameHistory and Presence
LanguageEnglish
SubjectPrayerbooks / Christian, Christianity / History, Christian Theology / General, Christianity / Catholic, History, Christian Rituals & Practice / Sacraments
Publication Year2016
TypeTextbook
AuthorRobert A. Orsi
Subject AreaReligion
FormatHardcover
Dimensions
Item Height1.2 in
Item Weight25.7 Oz
Item Length9.5 in
Item Width6.3 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional
LCCN2015-036422
ReviewsOrsi'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., 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., 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. 'e~Gods'e(tm) (to use Orsi 'e(tm)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'e"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 'e~a world we have lost.'e(tm) They belong to a world we have lost sight of., Perhaps the heart of his 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., [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., 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., 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., [A] brilliant, theologically sophisticated exploration of the Catholic experience of God'e(tm)s presence through the material world'e¦On every level'e"from its sympathetic, honest, and sometimes moving ethnography to its astute analytical observations'e"this book is a scholarly masterpiece., 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. 'e~Gods'e(tm) (to use Orsi'e(tm)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'e"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 'e~a world we have lost.'e(tm) They belong to a world we have lost sight of., 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., 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., 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., Orsi recaptures God'e(tm)s breaking into the world through stories that range from tales of saints, such as Bernadette, to common people who directly experienced divine intervention'e¦ The book does an excellent job of explaining both the difficulties and values inherent in recognizing God in the world., [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., 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., With reference to Marian apparitions, the cult of the saints and other divine'e"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., A fiercely inquisitive book on the heart of Roman Catholicism'e¦The bulk of History and Presence concentrates on'e¦the perception phenomenon at the back of worldwide cults of saints'e(tm) relics, holy shrines, saints'e(tm) 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., 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.
Dewey Edition23
IllustratedYes
Dewey Decimal234/.163
Table Of ContentCover Title Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction: Real Presence Chapter 1. The Obsolescence of the Gods Chapter 2. Abundant History Chapter 3. Holy Intimacies Chapter 4. Printed Presence Chapter 5. The Dead in the Company of the Living Chapter 6. The Happiness of Heaven Chapter 7. Events of Abundant Evil Epilogue: A Metric of Presence Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Index
SynopsisBeginning with metaphysical debates in the sixteenth century over the nature of Christ's presence in the host, the distinguished historian and scholar of religion Robert Orsi imagines an alternative to the future of religion that early moderns proclaimed was inevitable. The question of "real presence"--the Catholic doctrine of the literal, physical, embodied presence of Christ in the host--coincided with early modern global conquest and commerce and shaped how Europeans encountered the religions of others. The gods really present, in the Catholic sense, were translated into metaphors and symptoms, and into functions of the social and political. Presence became evidence of superstition, of magical thinking, of the infantile and irrational, the primitive and the savage. History and Presence radically confronts this intellectual heritage, proposing instead a model for the study of religion that begins with humans and gods present to each other in the circumstances of everyday life. Orsi then asks what it would mean to write history with the real presence of special beings restored. With reference to Marian apparitions, the cult of the saints, relations with the dead, and other Catholic instances of encounters with the gods really present, Orsi elaborates a theory of presence for the study of both contemporary religion and history. The unseeing of the gods was a foundational requirement of Western modernity. Orsi urges us to withhold from absence the intellectual and spiritual prestige modernity encourages us to give it, and instead to approach history with the gods fully present., The unseeing of the gods was a requirement of Western modernity. Beginning with sixteenth-century debates over Christ's real presence in the host, Robert Orsi imagines an alternative. He urges us to withhold from absence the prestige modernity encourages and instead to approach contemporary religion and history with the gods fully present.
LC Classification NumberBV825.3.O76 2016
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