Built with Faith

Built with Faith

Author: Joseph Sciorra

Publisher: Univ Tennessee Press

Published: 2018-05-15

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781621903833

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Over the course of 130 years, Italian American Catholics in New York City have developed a varied repertoire of devotional art and architecture to create community-based sacred spaces in their homes and neighborhoods. These spaces exist outside of but in relationship to the consecrated halls of local parishes and are sites of worship in conventionally secular locations. Such ethnic building traditions and urban ethnic landscapes have long been neglected by all but a few scholars. Joseph Sciorra’s Built with Faith offers a place-centric, ethnographic study of the religious material culture of New York City’s Italian American Catholics. Sciorra spent thirty-five years researching these community art forms and interviewing Italian immigrant and U.S.-born Catholics. By documenting the folklife of this group, Sciorra reveals how Italian Americans in the city use expressive culture and religious practices to transform everyday urban space into unique, communal sites of ethnically infused religiosity. The folk aesthetics practiced by individuals within their communities are integral to understanding how art is conceptualized, implemented, and esteemed outside of museum and gallery walls. Yard shrines, sidewalk altars, Nativity presepi, Christmas house displays, a stone-studded grotto, and neighborhood processions—often dismissed as kitsch or prized as folk art—all provide examples of the vibrant and varied ways contemporary Italian Americans use material culture, architecture, and public ceremonial display to shape the city’s religious and cultural landscapes. Written in an accessible style that will appeal to general readers and scholars alike, Sciorra’s unique study contributes to our understanding of how value and meaning are reproduced at the confluences of everyday life. Joseph Sciorra is the director of Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College. He is the editor of Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives and co-editor of Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women's Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora.


The Madonna of 115th Street

The Madonna of 115th Street

Author: Robert A. Orsi

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 0300157525

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A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Robert A. Orsi's classic study of popular religion in Italian Harlem. In a new preface, Orsi discusses significant shifts in the field of religious history and calls for new ways of empirically studying divine presences in human life. "The Madonna of 115th Street has over the last quarter century become a classic of American religious history. There are few books that I have enjoyed teaching more over the years and even fewer that have taught me as much about American Catholic history."—Leigh E. Schmidt, author of Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment


An Unlikely Union

An Unlikely Union

Author: Paul Moses

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-07-03

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 1479871303

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They came from the poorest parts of Ireland and Italy, and met as rivals on the sidewalks of New York. In the nineteenth century and for long after, the Irish and Italians fought in the Catholic Church, on the waterfront, at construction sites, and in the streets. Then they made peace through romance, marrying each other on a large scale in the years after World War II. An Unlikely Union unfolds the dramatic story of how two of America's largest ethnic groups learned to love and laugh with each other in the wake of decades of animosity. The vibrant cast of characters features saints such as


Priest, Parish, and People

Priest, Parish, and People

Author: Richard N. Juliani

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13:

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From the perspective of historical sociology, Richard N. Juliani traces the role of religion in the lives and communities of Italian immigrants in Philadelphia from the 1850s to the early 1930s. By the end of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia had one of the largest Italian populations in the country. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia eventually established twenty-three parishes for the exclusive use of Italians. Juliani describes the role these parishes played in developing and anchoring an ethnic community and in shaping its members' new identity as Italian Americans during the years of mass migration from Italy to America. Priest, Parish, and People blends the history of Monsignor Antonio Isoleri--pastor from 1870 to 1926 of St. Mary Magdalen dePazzi, the first Italian parish founded in the country--with that of the Italian immigrant community in Philadelphia. Relying on parish and archdiocesan records, secular and church newspapers, archives of religious orders, and Father Isoleri's personal papers, Juliani chronicles the history of St. Mary Magdalen dePazzi as it grew from immigrant refuge to a large, stable, ethnic community that anchored "Little Italy" in South Philadelphia. In charting that growth, Juliani also examines conflicts between laity and clergy and between clergy and church hierarchy, as well as the remarkable fifty-six-year career of Isoleri as a spiritual and secular leader. Priest, Parish, and People provides both the details of parish history in Philadelphia and the larger context of Italian-American Catholic history.


Immigration and Religion in America

Immigration and Religion in America

Author: Richard Alba

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 0814705049

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Religion has played a crucial role in American immigration history as an institutional resource for migrants' social adaptation, as a map of meaning for interpreting immigration experiences, and as a continuous force for expanding the national ideal of pluralism. To explain these processes the editors of this volume brought together the perspectives of leading scholars of migration and religion. The resulting essays present salient patterns in American immigrants' religious lives, past and present. In comparing the religious experiences of Mexicans and Italians, Japanese and Koreans, Eastern European Jews and Arab Muslims, and African Americans and Haitians, the book clarifies how such processes as incorporation into existing religions, introduction of new faiths, conversion, and diversification have contributed to America's extraordinary religious diversity and add a comprehensive religious dimension to our understanding of America as a nation of immigrants.


American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination

American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination

Author: Michael P. Carroll

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2007-11-12

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1421401991

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Michael P. Carroll argues that the academic study of religion in the United States continues to be shaped by a "Protestant imagination" that has warped our perception of the American religious experience and its written history and analysis. In this provocative study, Carroll explores a number of historiographical puzzles that emerge from the American Catholic story as it has been understood through the Protestant tradition. Reexamining the experience of Catholicism among Irish immigrants, Italian Americans, Acadians and Cajuns, and Hispanics, Carroll debunks the myths that have informed much of this history. Shedding new light on lived religion in America, Carroll moves an entire academic field in new, exciting directions and challenges his fellow scholars to open their minds and eyes to develop fresh interpretations of American religious history.


Italian American Pentecostalism and the Struggle for Religious Identity

Italian American Pentecostalism and the Struggle for Religious Identity

Author: Paul J. Palma

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-07-30

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0429581424

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While many established forms of Christianity have seen significant decline in recent decades, Pentecostals are currently one of the fastest growing religious groups across the world. This book examines the roots, inception, and expansion of Pentecostalism among Italian Americans to demonstrate how Pentecostalism moves so freely through widely varying cultures. The book begins with a survey of the origins and early shaping forces of Italian American Pentecostalism. It charts its birth among immigrants in Chicago as well as the initial expansion fuelled by the convergence of folk-Catholic, Reformed evangelical, and Holiness sources. The book goes on to explain how internal and external pressures demanded structure, leading to the founding of the Christian Church of North America in 1927. Paralleling this development was the emergence of the Italian District of the Assemblies of God, the Assemblee di Dio in Italia (Assemblies of God in Italy), the Canadian Assemblies of God, and formidable denominations in Brazil and Argentina. In the closing chapters, based on analysis of key theological loci and in lieu of contemporary developments, the future prospects of the movement are laid out and assessed. This book provides a purview into the religious lives of an underexamined, but culturally significant group in America. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of Pentecostalism, Religious Studies and Religious History, as well as Migrations Studies and Cultural Studies in America