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Rating: 
Summary: Best Depiction of Italian-American Life I Have Ever Read!!
Review: Great book! Covers not only the Catholicism of Italian Americans, but also a great deal about their home and family lives. Neither PC nor arrogant, this book depicts the Italian American world better than anything I have read! I kept nodding in agreement and underlining passages while reading. Forget the movie stereotypes and sentimental recollections; this is the real thing. It helped me understand my own culture a great deal.The only letdown was the part about a "Theology of the Streets." That section struck me as a tad unrealistic.
Rating:
Summary: Best Depiction of Italian-American Life I Have Ever Read!!
Review: Great book! Covers not only the Catholicism of Italian Americans, but also a great deal about their home and family lives. Neither PC nor arrogant, this book depicts the Italian American world better than anything I have read! I kept nodding in agreement and underlining passages while reading. Forget the movie stereotypes and sentimental recollections; this is the real thing. It helped me understand my own culture a great deal. The only letdown was the part about a "Theology of the Streets." That section struck me as a tad unrealistic.
Rating: 
Summary: How religion plays out in the everyday lives and experiences
Review: In The Madonna Of 115th Street, Robert A. Orsi (Charles Warren Professor of American Religious History, Harvard University) offers a seminal and ground breaking study of faith and community in New York City's Italian Harlem. The focus of this treatise is the annual Catholic festival called "Madonna of 115th Street" and how it has both influenced and reflects the lives of the men and women of the neighborhood. The Madonna Of 115th Street reveals a compelling perspective on how religion plays out in the everyday lives and experiences of American Catholics and the formation of a distinctive immigrant community. This Yale "Nota Bene" paperback edition is highly recommended reading and enhanced with a new introduction by Orsi outlining the changes that Italian Harlem has undergone in recent years and the significant shifts that have occurred in the field of American religious history.
Rating:
Summary: The Madonna: A Vivid and Complex Examination of the Festival
Review: In this lucid and eloquently written book, Orsi places the Madonna of 115th Street into the full context of the Italian Harlem community. I found the most interesting part of this extrememly insightful book to be Orsi's examination of the Italian-American domus, and how the complexities of the domus are played out in the festival itself. The book is a brilliant examination of the role of women in Italian Harlem; Orsi shows how the Madonna embodies both the power and restrictions of Italian-American women in this time. Orsi also effectively demonstrates how the Italian immigrants, with their annual festival, carved out an identity "niche" for themselves, apart from but no less legitimate than other immigrant groups and other, more church-oriented forms of Catholicism. For the Italian immigrants, the festival provided both an essential link to Italy and a way to define their particular community. This book is easily accessible to scholars, students, and the general public, and includes many interviews so the reader gets a vivid sense of the period and the people of Italian Harlem. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: The Madonna: A Vivid and Complex Examination of the Festival
Review: In this lucid and eloquently written book, Orsi places the Madonna of 115th Street into the full context of the Italian Harlem community. I found the most interesting part of this extrememly insightful book to be Orsi's examination of the Italian-American domus, and how the complexities of the domus are played out in the festival itself. The book is a brilliant examination of the role of women in Italian Harlem; Orsi shows how the Madonna embodies both the power and restrictions of Italian-American women in this time. Orsi also effectively demonstrates how the Italian immigrants, with their annual festival, carved out an identity "niche" for themselves, apart from but no less legitimate than other immigrant groups and other, more church-oriented forms of Catholicism. For the Italian immigrants, the festival provided both an essential link to Italy and a way to define their particular community. This book is easily accessible to scholars, students, and the general public, and includes many interviews so the reader gets a vivid sense of the period and the people of Italian Harlem. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: THE THEOLOGY OF THE STREETS
Review: Robert Orsi's Madonna of 115th Street is a brilliant multi-dimensional research on the meaning of "popular religion" in the Italian community of Harlem in New York. However, to be just, Orsi himself is rather cautious about labeling his study by the term "popular". It is "religion in the streets," Orsi says, that is in the center of his examination: "This study began in a sense of the limitations of the meaning of popular religion and a desire to broaden and deepen our understanding of this phenomenon" (Orsi, 1985:xiv). Robert Orsi raises pertinent and engaging questions regarding the melding of ethnicity, religion, and community values which have implications beyond the scope of the present work.
The study of Italian American religion begins with the people themselves as a story of suffering, conflict, and hope intimately related to Mary. The men and women of Italian Harlem, the Sicilian refugees brought to the United States along with their modest material goods their incredibly rich religiosity and devotion to the Marian cult. The latter, unlike in the case of Polish Catholics (Orsi, 1985:xvi), was hardly controlled by the Church structures. This unique feature of the Southern Italian Catholicism defined people's religion as the totality of their ultimate values, their most deeply held ethical convictions, their efforts to order their reality, their cosmology: "This also could be called their "ground of being", but only if this is understood in a very concrete, social-historical way, not as reality beyond their lives, but as the reason that, consciously and unconsciously, structured and was expressed in their actions and reflections" (Orsi, 1985:xvii). Orsi's analysis resembles Durkheim's research on The Elementary Forms of Religious Life who believes that religion is "a fundamental and permanent aspect of humanity". The reality of religious forces is to be found in the real experience of social life, according to Durkheim (Durkheim, 1995:36). Interestingly enough, in the same way as Durkheim finds the birth of that idea in rites, as moments of collective effervescence, Orsi finds the annual festa of the Madonna of Mount Carmel in the 115th Street in the heart of the socio-religious dynamics of the Italian Harlem.
Symbol, ritual, and myth - the entire experience of Mount Carmel emerged from and referred back to the people's lives; the men and women of Italian Harlem shared and found themselves in the destiny of symbolic meanings when they attended the festa of the Madonna of 115th Street. In turn, their experience of the Madonna shaped their American destiny.
Rating:
Summary: Reflective and penetrating
Review: This book helped me think in new ways about the place of tradition and authority in the contemporary world. Orsi's reconstruction of the mental and social schemata of the Italian community in East Harlem is a fascinating, compelling story. His research is impressive and his interpretation persuasive. Three cheers for Orsi's "theology of the streets."
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