Robert A. Orsi, Charles Warren Professor of American Religious History, Harvard Divinity School, will address the question, "Were We Ever That Weird? Parish Devotions and Catholic Memory" as part of the IHC Catholic Studies Research Focus Group Lecture Series at 4 P.M. on Thursday, April 25 in the McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building. Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, copies of his book, Gods of the City will be available for purchase and signing at this event.

Description

Why do Catholics in the U.S. Today relentlessly remember their childhoods in the church? Why do they go for entertainment to theatrical productions that force them to reenact their childhoods (as in Late Nite Catechism)? Sometimes all this seems less to do about remembering than it does about forgetting--could it be that Catholics obsessively remember in order to forget? Orsi will explore how Catholics remember and what they forget about the last fifty years in the life of the American Church, looking at memory as cultural and religious practice, a medium for reimagining the sacred and the self in relation to the sacred.

Speaker

The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (which received the Jesuit National Book Award and John Gilmary Shea Prize from the American Catholic Historical Association), Thank You, Saint Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes, Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape, Religious Practice in Everyday Life: Essays on the Study of Religion (forthcoming). Since receiving his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Yale University in 1982, he has taught at the Universita degli Studi di Roma in Italy, Fordham University, Indiana University, and Harvard University, where he now serves as Charles Warren Professor of American Religious History, Harvard Divinity School. He has been awarded numerous academic honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lilly Endowment consultation award for project on "Children and Religion," National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. Currently he serves as President-elect, American Academy of Religion (2001-2002). He is also a member of the Executive Council, American Society of Church History (2001-present), the editorial board of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the editorial board of the Journal of Religion and American Culture.

This event is cosponsored by the IHC Catholic Studies Research Focus Group, UCSB Bookstore, and Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.