Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion by Michael P. Carroll (review)

humanities 301 cently, postmodernism calls into question the validity of scientific approaches altogether. On one or more of these grounds scholars of religion justify placing theological suppositions at the core of their work. Wiebe's chapters constitute an excellent review and critique of these many theologies parasitic on the academic study of religion. Many of my colleagues in a religious studies department complain that the American Academy of Religion is too secular. Wiebe provides perspective on this also. He shows ongoing support for theological presuppositions in the history, practices, and atmosphere of the AAR, represented in various ways such as by presidential and other plenary lectures, and in the distance the AAR keeps from the International Association for the History of Religions and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religions. Wiebe's detailed analyses provide the scholar with a sound basis for a judgment about the scholar's own options in her or his analysis of religion, in writings and in the classroom. Wiebe leaves me convinced that the goal should be to analyse both naturalistic and theologically oriented general interpretations of religion and the theologies of specific traditions as well, but then to review all of these with the same critical or `scientific' tools: the arguments and evidence for and against each of them. One can respect the transcendent orientation of religious believers, understand and describe vividly their beliefs in supernatural powers at work in the world, present the theological analyses made by believers B but then also carry out the academic task of critically analysing disagreements and differences among religions, as well as sceptical cases against the validity of religious claims. It is this critical approach that makes the study academic. Wiebe seems to use the word `scientific,' however, more restrictively. He sometimes speaks as though he would exclude humanistic aspects of religion from academic study. This may simply be a reaction against those who use the cover of humanistic studies to smuggle in theology. I suspect Wiebe would allow treatment of humanistic elements in religion, as long as the treatment is fully naturalistic, making no appeal to supernatural causes or realities to explain things. As a philosopher of religion, for example, Wiebe can recognize that religion often does represent concern for the transcendent, however that may be defined. Such human concerns may sometimes be best understood through the medium of literature, art, and philosophy. An academic curriculum in religious studies would do well to include these aspects of religion, as long as the final critical evaluation is naturalistic, as in science, rather than supernaturalistic or theological. (MICHAEL H. BARNES) Michael P. Carroll. Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion Johns Hopkins University Press. x, 226. US $38.00 302 letters in canada 1999 A recent Scottish professor of ecclesiastical history was famous for his dictum that an interest in `the ancient Celtic Church' of Britain, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland was the first sign of insanity. The enormous modern popular appetite for `Celtic spirituality,' in pagan or Christian form, has inspired more nonsense than any other subject under heaven, not excepting the Great Pyramid, the lost continent of Atlantis, and the Knights Templar. As an attack on such nonsense, this book is strongly commended. It is, moreover, closely argued and sharply and attractively written from an inner knowledge of the contrasting Irish and Italian forms of Catholicism. Its heart lies in an examination of the Irish cult of holy wells and the associated `rounding rituals' of walking around `stations' (usually stone piles and circles) with a penitential purpose, reciting prayers for the forgiveness of sins. Many Irish scholars, from the era of the Romantic movement on, often inspired by the nationalist notion of a pure Celtic pagan or Christian past, have assumed or argued that such rituals are of ancient, possibly pre-Christian, Celtic origin, suggesting that they only fell into decay with the `Devotional Revolution' synonymous with the spread of Mass and chapel-centred Tridentine Catholicism in Ireland in the nineteenth century. There is certainly a striking contrast between thèimageless' character of rounding ritual, centred on wells and stones, and the image-centred Catholicism of Latin Europe. Carroll objects to the theory of pagan...