- A Second Solidarity
In Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them, Robert A. Orsi brings the same kind of "empirical and so more realistic and humane" (147) approach to the figure of the scholar of religion that he wishes such scholars would bring to the study of religion itself. Orsi's work has long stood as a challenge to resist "hidden normativities" (6) that keep us from attending to religion in all its messiness, materiality, and unpredictability and thereby restrict our study to forms of religion that inspire and please us. Through his example, he has urged us to leave nothing out. In his study of the shrine of St. Jude in Chicago, Orsi gathers up the teasing intimacy he observes between an elderly couple in the pews, the liberation theology proclaimed by the priest from the shrine's pulpit, the woman crawling up the aisle on her knees toward the statute of St. Jude, and the intersection of his own confrontation with hopelessness and the courage St. Jude's faithful bring to their devotion into a rich religious history. For Orsi, religion has less to do with explaining the world and more to do with the "network of relationships between heaven and earth" among men, women, children, saints, gods, and other holy figures.
In Between Heaven and Earth, Orsi does not find the scholar of religion standing outside that network of relationships, doing her work alone. He finds her crowded in among the saints and practitioners, doing her work within a web of relationships. Refusing the fantasy of the purely detached or purely confessional scholarly stance, Orsi urges us to acknowledge and explore the many ways in which we are neither wholly inside nor wholly outside what we study. There are ghosts in the hallways of religious studies departments, Orsi writes: the tongue-speaking mother, the minister father, the nuns and priests who educated us when we were children. The scholar who worries that he will intrude upon the religious lives of others during his field work turns out to be the same boy who watched his parents turn from him into the intensity of their prayer, an intensity that made them seem vulnerable in the boy's eyes, a vulnerability that confused and disturbed him. [End Page 96]
Orsi posits what he calls "a third way, between confessional or theological scholarship, on the one hand, and radically secular scholarship on the other" (198) that takes the scholar's own experience with religion into account. The space between heaven and earth is also a place in between scholarly approaches that threaten to predetermine our interpretations; it is a place that requires us to be present to what is other than ourselves while resisting the impulse to turn the other into something we recognize, and to make ourselves vulnerable to the "radically destabilizing possibilities" of such an encounter. Working as a scholar of religion in this in-between place between self and other requires the "disciplining" of one's "mind and heart" through practices that encourage attention, risk, suspension, engagement, and an openness to transformation.
Orsi's approach to the study of religion bears striking family resemblances to the developing field of Christian spirituality. Once perceived as a (somewhat suspect) subfield of theology, the field of spirituality has also attempted to create a "third way" by which we might explore the space between heaven and earth in the company of practitioners, holy figures and other scholars. Just as Clara, a devotee of St. Jude, challenged Orsi with the question, "How can you understand what we're doing when we pray to St. Jude if you don't pray to St. Jude," scholars working in the field of spirituality have been so challenged both by those we study (think of Bernard of Clairvaux warning us in his commentary on the Song of Songs that "only personal experience can unfold its meaning"1 ) and those we teach (think of scholar Mary Frohlich's students asking her "Why should we study spirituality academically when what is really of interest is being spiritually transformed?"2 ). Scholars of spirituality are also familiar with the...