Religion and Public Life Series
The Religion and Public Life lecture series presents public conversations that expand on current theories and spur debate about religion and secularism, considering the range of secularisms and institutionalizations of religion in Europe, the US, and other parts of the world. Lectures in the series examine specific approaches to how something called “religion” is manifest in public life, and cover timely topics including law, museums and cultural institutions, education and health provisions, politics/diplomacy, prisons, and protest and social movements.
History and Presence
The question of “real presence”—the Catholic doctrine of the literal, physical, embodied presence of Christ in the host—coincided with early modern global conquest and commerce and shaped how Europeans encountered the religions of others. The gods really present, in the Catholic sense, were translated into metaphors and symptoms, and into functions of the social and political. Presence became evidence of superstition, of magical thinking, of the infantile and irrational, the primitive and the savage. History and Presence radically confronts this intellectual heritage, proposing instead a model for the study of religion that begins with humans and gods present to each other in the circumstances of everyday life. Orsi then asks what it would mean to write history with the real presence of special beings restored. With reference to Marian apparitions, the cult of the saints, relations with the dead, and other Catholic instances of encounters with the gods really present, Orsi elaborates a theory of presence for the study of both contemporary religion and history.
The unseeing of the gods was a foundational requirement of Western modernity. Orsi urges us to withhold from absence the intellectual and spiritual prestige modernity encourages us to give it, and instead to approach history with the gods fully present.
This event requires registration. There are associated readings from Robert Orsi's book, History and Presence, that will be emailed to you once you register. This event will be followed by a reception.
Please email info@ircpl.org to register.
Robert Orsi is Professor of Religious Studies and History and Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern University. He researches, writes, and teaches about religion in the United States, in the past and in contemporary contexts, with a particular focus on American Catholicism. He is also interested in how “religion” developed as a subject of inquiry from early modernity to the present and in questions of method and theory in the study of religion. His scholarship draws on history, ethnography, religious studies, and psychological theories of imagination and of intersubjectivity to study the religious practices of men, women, and children.