Description:
A vital collection of interdisciplinary essays that illuminates the significance of Marian shrines and promises to teach scholars how to "read" them for decades to come.
American Patroness: Marian Shrines and the Making of US Catholicism is a collection of twelve essays that examine the historical and contemporary roles of Marian shrines in US Catholicism. The essays in this collection use historical, ethnographic, and comparative methods to explore how Catholics have used Marian devotion to make an imprint on the physical and religious landscape of the United States. Using the dynamic malleability of Marian shrines as a starting place for studying US Catholicism, each chapter reconsiders the American religious landscape from the perspective of a single shrine to Mary and asks: What does this shrine reveal about US Catholicism and about American religion? Each of the contributors in American Patroness examines why and how Marian shrines persist in the twenty-first century and subsequently uses that examination to re-read contemporary US Catholicism. Because shrines are not neutral spaces--they reflect and shape the elastic yet strict boundaries of what counts as Catholic identity, and who controls prayer practices--the studies in this collection also shed light on the contested dynamics of these holy sites. American Patroness demonstrates that Marian shrines continue to be places where an American Catholic identity is continuously worked on, negotiations about power occur, and Marian relationships are fostered and nurtured in spaces that are simultaneously public and intimate.Brief description: Karen E. Park is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wisconsin. She has written widely on Marian devotion and shrines and American religion and popular culture. She holds a PhD from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.
Review Quotes: American Patroness is beautiful in its multiplicity. This is much more than a book on Marian shrines, it is a book that explores Catholic devotion in its radical, conservative, and irreverent registers. Here we find informal shrines made from murals and underpasses, and shrines in their most triumphalist institutional forms--each offering a different vision of what it means to be Catholic in the US. Across these shrinescapes, Catholics work out approaches to immigration, disability, reproductive politics and gentrification. Shrines are no quaint remnants of a Catholic devotional past, but a key, mutable resource for exploring the contours of Catholicism in our contemporary world.---Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada, author of Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn