Gods of the City (review)

Robert A. Orsi has brought together ten essays that focus on urban religion—or, as he often refers to it, "religion on the ground" or "lived religion." The essays address issues pertaining to urban religion in 20th-century America and "the shaping role that cities have played in the religious life of our nation" (p. ix). While each essay deals with a separate individual or group, there are common themes that run through them: the importance of the physical environment in which these religions are practiced—how the religious landscape/space is established and, if necessary, altered; another theme is the effect of contact among diverse groups of people in densely populated urban environments—the bondings and conflicts that are generated in close personal contact.

The book divides naturally into four sections. The first section consists of an extended introduction written by Orsi on the study of urban environments, the differing attitudes that have arisen concerning cities and city life, and the concept of urban religion. Orsi briefly reviews the literature on urban life, in which it is often described "as caves of rum and Romanism, mysterious and forbidding, a threat to democracy . . . site of moral depravity [and] lascivious allure . . . squalid, dangerous slums and exotic locales of forbidden sensual delights" (pp. 6-7). The city becomes a trope that is at once alluring and dangerous. This squalid, sinful side attracted early Christian reformers to the city as preachers, as founders of settlement houses preaching a social gospel, and as seminarians seeking a training ground. Cities are also gathering places for recent immigrants and migrants—both unrooted groups that often bring their own language, food, customs, and religion to their new homes. Orsi, and others in this collection, argue that these people often reject the official designation and assignment of space that denies their existence, by rearranging the landscape and constructing their own holy sites for the performance of sacred rituals. In addition, the authors also argue that "industrial and postindustrial cities have been the ground of a unique religious creativity." They refer to this religious creativity as "urban religion" that "comes from the dynamic engagement of religious traditions . . . with specific features of the industrial and post-industrial cityscapes and with the social conditions of city life" (p. 43). Orsi posits the thesis that there are religious cartographies/to-pographies/ontologies, or "maps of being" (p. 51), in the city which people create for themselves. The essays that follow this introduction attempt to articulate these "maps."

The second section of the book consists of four essays that focus on recent immigrants to urban environments and their attempts to "re-craft inherited traditions, invent new ritual practices, and reconfigure the meanings of cities" (p. 58). Karen McCarthy Brown, through a study of the Vodou priestess Mama Lola who immigrated to Brooklyn 15 years ago from Haiti, wants to examine the "elusive process by which the physical spaces in which we live either reinforce our cosmological assumptions or grate against them" (p. 85). Brown focuses on the meanings of pouring libations, an agricultural feast, and Vodou-Catholic pilgrimage in New York City—how these ritual activities are enacted in the new environment of New York, and how they have been changed from their practice in Haiti. Joanne Punzo Wag-horne looks at recent Indian immigrants who are unusual in that they not only left urban areas in India but are also middle-class professionals. Waghorne explains that Hindu temple building in the United States has been increasing in recent years, accompanied by a discussion among Indians of the place of India within Hinduism, and the place of Hinduism in middle-class Indian lives. She focuses on the use of (and changes made in) certain temple architectural features (e.g., the use of different levels and the manner of enclosing space) that are part of an ongoing debate about how Hinduism should be expressed in an American context. Thomas A. Tweed reports on a Cuban Catholic shrine in Miami that is a focus...