History and Presence

Product Description

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

Beginning with metaphysical debates in the sixteenth century over the nature of Christ’s presence in the host, the distinguished historian and scholar of religion Robert Orsi imagines an alternative to the future of religion that early moderns proclaimed was inevitable.

“Orsi’s evoking of the full reality of the holy in the world is extremely moving, shot through with wonder and horror.”
―Caroline Walker Bynum, Common Knowledge

“This is a meticulously researched, humane, and deeply challenging book. The men and women studied in this book do not belong to ‘a world we have lost.’ They belong to a world we have lost sight of.”
―Peter Brown, Princeton University

“[A] brilliant, theologically sophisticated exploration of the Catholic experience of God’s presence through the material world… On every level―from its sympathetic, honest, and sometimes moving ethnography to its astute analytical observations―this book is a scholarly masterpiece.”
―A. W. Klink, Choice

“Orsi recaptures God’s breaking into the world … The book does an excellent job of explaining both the difficulties and values inherent in recognizing God in the world.”
―Publishers Weekly

“This book is classic Orsi: careful, layered, humane, and subtle…a thought-provoking, expertly arranged tour of precisely those abundant, excessive phenomena which scholars have historically found so difficult to think.”
―Sonja Anderson, Reading Religion

Top Reviews

What a Wealth of Reflection!
by QuintessentiallyYours (5 out of 5 stars)
April 17, 2016

This book is something Catholics - and anyone - who wants to reflect on the Presence, from the Eucharist into remarkable devotionals, really ought to read. The topic is unique; I have never seen something like this range of ideas covered - much less connected to Presence, but also the writing is simply exquisite. Great read. Great gift for the Catholic you know.
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A field-shifting contribution from one of the most influential scholars ...
by richardkevans (5 out of 5 stars)
April 19, 2018

A field-shifting contribution from one of the most influential scholars of American religion in this century. It deftly introduces readers to one of the defining debates within the field of religious studies--how does the academic study of religion take seriously the miraculous, the supernatural, and the transcendent (which Orsi calls "abundant events") while subtly critiquing the presumptions we bring to this debate. This is the kind of book we will be arguing about for generations. History and Presence is a must read for scholars and students alike.
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A Rare Combination: Scholarly and Entertaining
by Amazon Customer (5 out of 5 stars)
May 23, 2016

Following his work in such classics as "The Madonna of 115th Street" and "Between Heaven and Earth," Orsi returns with another valuable contribution to the field of religious studies which still manages to be of interest (entertaining even!) to a wide readership. Orsi writes in a conversational style, using his considerable skill as a storyteller to distill three decades of fieldwork into an intelligent argument about the place of Presence in scholarship. Whether you carry around memories of your Italian Catholic grandmother, or you're unfamiliar with the term transubstantiation, there is something here for everyone; Richly detailed footnotes which tune into ongoing conversations, as well as moving and humorous anecdotes about Catholic life in the 20th century and in the present. Orsi's work is indispensable for those interested in religious studies, history, or theology, and "History and Presence" is a fine addition to the list.
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Five Stars
by John E. Banks (5 out of 5 stars)
June 6, 2016

This is a splendid book.
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Presence as in Devotions. 20 years ago!
by Shirley Musich (3 out of 5 stars)
November 6, 2016

Based too much on devotions popular in the church 20 years ago. If you wish long enough, events do seem to happen even if not real!
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Five Stars
by Phyllis S Twadell (5 out of 5 stars)
April 23, 2016

A great read
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Rather selective history of American Catholics
by Thomas J. Farrell (4 out of 5 stars)
August 3, 2016

My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit cultural historian and theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). Not counting reprinted articles, he has more than 400 publications to his credit. See Thomas M. Walsh's (Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006" in the book Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Walsh (New York: Hampton Press, 2011, pages 185-245).

Over the years, I took five English courses from Fr. Ong at Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri, and I have written about his thought extensively. Perhaps I should also say that my entire formal education, including my post-doctoral studies of philosophy and theology when I was in the Jesuits for about eight years, was in Roman Catholic educational institutions.

Before Ong proceeded to Harvard to undertake his doctoral studies in English, almost all of his formal education had been in American Catholic educational institutions, except for one year in a public elementary school in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Nevertheless, Ong did not grow up in what certain American Catholic sociologists have characterized as the "ghetto" culture of American Catholicism (their term), because his father and his father's family were all white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs). His Ong family ancestors left East Anglia on the same ship that brought Roger Williams to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631. (However, at that time, their family name was spelled "Onge"; it is probably related to the English name "Yonge.")

In his new book History and Presence (Cambridge, MA; and London, UK: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), Robert A. Orsi in history at Northwestern University says in an endnote, "This chapter [chapter four] also takes inspiration from Walter J. Ong, SJ, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967)" (page 292). So Orsi is not entirely unfamiliar with Ong's thought, but he does not in his text work with Ong's thought. No doubt Orsi is free to choose not to work with Ong's thought.

But Ong's multivariate account of our Western cultural history is deeply relevant to Orsi's interest in the Roman Catholic theological doctrine of presence. For a study of that doctrine, see Fr. Robert Sokolowski's book Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993).

Where to start? Because Orsi discusses the view of comics expressed certain American Catholics, let me start with Ong's article "The Comics and the Super State: Glimpses Down the Back Alleys of the Mind" in the Arizona Quarterly, volume 1, number 3 (Autumn 1945): pages 34-48. Ong's article was twice written up in Time (Oct. 22, 1945, pages 67-68; and Nov. 5, 1945, page 23).

From the early 1940s onward, Ong regularly published pieces about popular culture in the Jesuit-sponsored magazine America and elsewhere. In Orsi's bibliography of primary sources, he lists eight articles in America, but none by Ong. Between 1939 and 1996, Ong published twenty-three pieces in twenty-five issues of America, including twelve essays (including two two-part essays), nine book reviews, one poem, and one letter.

Granted, for understandable reasons, Orsi had to delimit his study and be selective in choosing which sources to use. But his selectivity strikes me as problematic.

Next, I want to mention that I took Ong's course Practical Criticism: Prose at SLU in the spring semester of 1966. Among other works on the list of required readings was the American Jesuit classicist William F. Lynch's The Image Industries (London and New York: Sheed and Ward, 1959) - in addition to the Canadian Catholic convert Marshall McLuhan's book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951) and The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). At the time, I was impressed with Lynch's 1959 book, and to this day I remain impressed with it.

But I want to note that Orsi does not mention any books by Lynch or McLuhan. Lynch published seven books. In the main titles or subtitles of five of them, the words image, images, and imagination appear seven times. In the new book Building the Human City: William F. Lynch's Ignatian Spirituality for Public Life (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications/ Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2016), John F. Kane in religious studies at Regis University, the Jesuit university in Denver, reports that Lynch's books were written up in 1960 in Time and in the New York Times Book Review (pages 6-7). Surely Lynch's work is relevant to certain themes Orsi discusses.

But enough! Suffice it to say that there are various other points in Ong's extensive body of work that can deepen our understanding of the inner experience of presence.
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Orsi has brilliant insights, well-documented claims through ethnography
by J Stuart (5 out of 5 stars)
January 22, 2017

One of the most important books written on American religion in some time. Orsi has brilliant insights, well-documented claims through ethnography, and has the best academic writing voice I have ever encountered.
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Wonderful historical accounting with fascinating stories about the author's experience ...
by Eric Hamilton (5 out of 5 stars)
December 2, 2016

Wonderful historical accounting with fascinating stories about the author's experience and others. Highly recommend if you have an interest in religion, practice, experience, history, Catholicism, or how scholars study these things.
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Four Stars
by P Wegener (4 out of 5 stars)
January 7, 2017

My daughter pleased with her gift.

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