Widely Admired Scholar of 20th Century Catholicism and Devotions to Lecture on ‘Catholic Childhood’ at Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – Robert Orsi, Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard Divinity School, will give a talk titled "Catholic Childhood" on March 14 at 7:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross. The lecture, free and open to the public, is part of the Deitchman Family Lectures on Religion and Modernity series.

Orsi will present his most recent research which is a social and cultural history of growing up Catholic in the United States in the 20th century. The research raises questions about children’s distinctive religious experiences and about what it means to become persons within specific worlds of religious practice and imagination.

Orsi’s past work has focused on religion in the history and contemporary life of American cities, religion and immigration, Catholic devotionalism, particularly human relations with saints, gender and religion.

He is the author of The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (Yale University Press, 1988); Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (Yale University Press, 1998) and Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious World People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton University Press, 2004).

Sponsored by the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture, Deitchman Family Lectures explore "the place of religious and spiritual life in a world that is sometimes at odds with faith, other times in search of it, and always at work reshaping it."