Italy’s traditional subcultures - Communist, Socialist, Liberal, Republican, Right-wing - have largely dissolved and yet Catholics have retained their vitality and solidity. How can the vast majority of Italians continue to maintain some connection with Catholicism? How much is the Italian situation influenced by the closeness of the Vatican? Examining the religious condition of contemporary Italy, Religion Italian Style argues that the relationship between religion and society in Italy has unique characteristics when compared with what is happening in other European Catholic Countries. Exploring key topics and religious trends which question how the population feel - from the laity and the role of religions in the public sphere, to moral debates, forms of religious pluralism, and new spiritualities - this book questions how these affect religious life, and how intricately religion is interwoven with the nation’s fabric and the dynamics of the whole society.
Religion as Resistance examines debates over the best methods for colonial rule in Italian Libya as a a self-reflexive process that tell us more about the contentious connection between religious and political authority in Italy than about Muslim North Africa.
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.
When religion is considered, the subjects are usually saints, heretics, theologians, and religious leaders, thereby ignoring the vast majority of those who lived in the communes. Drawing on many ecclesiastical and secular sources, this book aims to give a voice to the majority - orthodox lay people and those who ministered to them.
This study of Italian women and Catholicism from the fourth through the twentieth century reflects this conflict and the tension between the masculine character of divinity in the Catholic church and the potential for equality in the gospels and early writings ("neither male nor female, but one in Jesus")."--BOOK JACKET.
This book explores the concept of diffused religion as it is found in contemporary society, resulting from a vast process of religious socialisation that continues to pervade our cultural reality. It provides a critical engagement with a framework of non-institutional religion that is based on values largely shared in society by being diffused through primary and secondary socialisation. Cipriani also contends that these very values which give form to diffused religion can also be seen in themselves as their own kind of religion. As a result, they go beyond secularisation and favour the religious continuum extending around the world of diffused religions. This work will be of great interest to scholars in the Sociology of Religion and to anyone wanting to learn more about the social aspects of religion.
