Built with Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City by Joseph Sciorra (review)

In Built with Faith folklorist Joseph Sciorra explores the material culture of New York’s Italian American Catholics. In particular, Sciorra looks at yard shrines, domestic altars, elaborate Christmas displays, and street processions attached to the saints’ feast days as examples of religion as lived praxis. Focusing a scholarly lens on rituals and objects that others have dismissed as kitsch, Sciorra offers an illuminating tour of the dynamic religious and cultural life of contemporary Italian American New York and its relationship to the built environment of the city.

Built with Faith is situated mainly in the postwar period, focused on recent Italian immigrants (those who emigrated in the second half of the twentieth century and their children) who have revived and maintained traditional rituals even in the face of the modernization of U.S. church practices related to Vatican II. The book is organized as a series of case studies rather than chronologically. The first chapter examines the creation and maintenance of temporary sidewalk altars and permanent shrines placed in front yards, garages, basements, and other spaces that straddle the line between public and private. In the second chapter, Sciorra discusses presepi (crèches), elaborate dioramas created out of sacred and found objects. He moves on in chapter 3 to consider the extravagant Christmas displays that use up to 200,000 lights, can cost up to $20,000 a year, and bring tens of thousands of people every Christmas season to otherwise quiet residential neighborhoods like Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, and Ozone Park, Queens. Chapter 4 looks at a single site—a grotto in Rosebank, Staten Island, dedicated to our Lady of Mount Carmel—and the varied meanings that different individuals and groups have invested in the shrine over time. The final chapter looks at the changing shape and meaning of feast-day processions in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as the neighborhood has undergone demographic and cultural change. The book is rich with images, including eighty-one photographs. These illustrations are extremely useful given the strongly visual character of the artifacts that Sciorra studies.

Sciorra has immersed himself in the life of Italian American New York. He conducted the ethnography upon which this book is based over a period of thirty-five years, beginning his study in 1979. In addition to consulting such sources as newspapers and websites, his research included “casual chats on sidewalks and over the telephone, formal interviews conducted around kitchen tables and in social clubs, and eventually exchanges via email and social network sites” (xxxii). Sciorra’s intimate association with his subject is a strength of the book. He rejects patronizing approaches that see the objects as tacky or the rituals as adjunct to “true” religious practices. By taking them seriously, Sciorra argues, we can understand “the vivid and creative ways personal devotion is publicly enacted and negotiated” as an important part of “the city’s religious landscape” (3).

Sciorra is also attuned to the complexity of the artifacts he studies, including the fact that they are dynamic. Meanings and rituals change over time. The very objects develop. For example, the grotto for Our Lady of Mt. Carmel and the presepi are literally growing as individuals add figurines, stones, and other objects to them. Likewise, the altars and presepi, even the Christmas displays, are not static: timed illumination, accompanying music, and even the layout of the Nativity scenes suggest movement and a narrative flow. Thus, there is a performative aspect even to the altars, shrines, and crèches.

Built with Faith should appeal to students of urban studies and the urban landscape. The city, and New York City in particular, is at the heart of Sciorra’s inquiry. He asserts throughout that the artifacts he examines are rooted in a particular place—that there is something specifically “New York” about the shape and meanings of the objects and...