Communal Living with the Saints: A Late Nineteenth-Century Devotional Aesthetic at Immaculate Conception Academy, Oldenburg, Indiana

Devotional aesthetics involve an embodied, sensory encounter between sacred and earthly subjects through objects and rituals. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the regnant devotional aesthetic among U.S. Catholics fully embraced the bodily and sensory, welcoming the sacred into daily life. This led to communal living among heavenly and earthly figures and encouraged a blending of the sacred and mundane. Such a devotional aesthetic is revealed through an examination of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century student portfolios from Immaculate Conception Academy in Oldenburg, Indiana, an all-girls boarding school conducted by the Sisters of the Third Order Regular of St. Francis. Though not all of the writings are expressly religious in nature, the portfolios are filled with stories of holy objects and figures and the many ways in which these objects and figures were gently woven into and consecrated the students' daily lives.