The Catholic Studies Reader

16. Cultural Studies Between Heaven and Earth: Beyond the Puritan Pedagogy of The Scarlet Letter

16 Cultural Studies Between Heaven and Earth Beyond the Puritan Pedagogy of The Scarlet Letter thomas j. ferraro American literature is distinguished by the number of dangerous and disturbing books in its canon—and American scholarship by its ability to conceal this fact. Leslie A. Fiedler When the North American Studies section of the American Academy of Religion asked me to respond, in November 2005, to Robert A. Orsi’s book Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them, I cast about for a way of revealing , in concentrated but also prismatic form, what is at issue in Orsi’s work for American Studies at large.1 Surely, Orsi has succeeded in mainstreaming Italian American social history, ethnicizing American Catholic historiography, and challenging the Protestant-centeredness of U.S. religious history, and just as surely the religious-studies wing of our profession does not need me—a literature-and-arts guy—to tell them that. On the other hand, U.S. cultural studies came of age in the 1990s confident not only of the basic irrelevance of religious phenomena —there was not a single panel on religion at the 1994 American Studies Association (ASA) convention in Nashville, where Routledge editor Bill Germano told me to ‘‘forget about it, they are just not interested ’’—but also of the secular inviolability of its methods and commitments , certain stirrings of the spirit in Native American, Latino/a, and Black Atlantic studies notwithstanding. But we now are most definitely thinking otherwise—evidence the recent ASA formation of the Working Group in American Religion and its widely acclaimed special issue of American Quarterly.2 As neglected issues and scholarship are brought to the common table under rubrics such as ‘‘religion and politics,’’ what cultural studies between heaven and earth 353 difference will they make not only to our scope of inquiry but also to our disciplinary assumptions and methods? How, in particular, might the work of Orsi—a seminal figure in the new religious history, a recent president of the American Academy of Religion, and a writer of theoretically knowing, formally experimental ethnography par excellence— unsettle cultural studies? I have neither the space nor the expertise to do Orsi’s scholarship or its potential use-value for cultural criticism full justice. What follows is a brief exegesis—part imaginative leap and part polemical gambit— designed to take one measure of Orsi in, I hope, illuminating, strangely old-fashioned because mythopoetic, interdisciplinary terms. It comes from my suspicion that what is old news in religious studies is new news in cultural studies, and vice versa; more importantly, it comes from the conviction that we should never underestimate the residual influence of either religion or literature in the intellectual practices of Americanists, particularly those schooled in the United States—where Protestant sensibility, as filtered through Protestant and post-Protestant understandings of predominantly Protestant writers, still speaks, however sotto voce. Robert Anthony Orsi, our greatest scholar of urban working-class devotionalism, of the uses of Saint Jude, Saint Gemma, and Blessed Margaret of Castello, of Marian apparitions and first communions and maternal sacrifice, is also our greatest reader of America’s most hallowed novel—and I bet he doesn’t even know it. To link by fiat a contemporary work of religious history and a hoary, indeed encrusted New England antebellum novel, as I propose to do here, sounds foolhardy at best, an act of decontextualizing academic violence. It is certainly not the sort of thing scholars do these days—especially given the now longstanding repudiation of classic American literature (indeed, of the assumed use-value of literary analysis itself) and the renewed calls to multicultural, transnational, and postcolonial ethnography. Still, I will stand on the heuristic value of this juxtaposition, as well as the overt stylization of my rendering of it—which is a mode both of access and address, of evidence and enactment. At stake in the tactical cross-identi fication and interrogation I am about to pursue briefly here is nothing 354 thomas j. ferraro less, I think, than the long, complex, utterly vexed interaction of fiction , faith, and intellect in the United States: our received understandings of who and why we are, how we have gotten where we are and what we are doing to imagine otherwise. From the start, Robert Orsi has been drawn to the margins of midtwentieth...