Disputing Sacred Space in America

Kelly Baker

The newest issue of Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief is now available (with a library subscription). For those of unfamiliar with this journal, it is an excellent, interdisciplinary journal that provides cutting edge scholarship on the materiality of religion. Every time the table of contents arrives in my inbox, I stop whatever I am doing to see what the issue holds. The July issue is no different, and it contains a conversation about sacred space in America with Erika Doss, Anthea Butler, Jacob Kinnard, and Edward Linenthal. From outdoor space at the U.S. Air Force Academy for Wiccans and Druids to worship to a disappearing cross in the Mojave to "the shadow of ground zero" to the Enola Gay, ordinary spaces become sacred, contested, desecrated, and defiled.

Doss argues that public debates are both "sweeping--indicative of widespread interests in claiming public spaces and places as an extension of personal values and beliefs--and presentist--driven by the inconstant and fluctuating aims and concerns of particular publics at particular historical moments" (270). What becomes sacred space and who claims its sacrality emerge as crucial components of public debate. The contributors note how questions of space, and whether it is sacred or not, become markers of deep religious intolerance in contemporary America. Contestations over sacred space become contestations over the place of religion in public life, and certain religions garner more legitimacy, cultural capital.

Butler writes about how a cross in a desert emerges in discourse as both a religious and a secular symbol, and the space it inhabits, thus, becomes significant and ambiguous. Its absence even more so. Kinnard emphasizes that the debate over Park51 becomes an"easy synecdoche" to understanding the place of Islam in the nation (275), and the all of America becomes a "ground zero" with any mosque nation-wide, a violation. Linenthal ponders the ease at which sites of mass murder become sacred to Americans and how space becomes sacred, if it can be defiled. Space can emerge as separate from the ordinary because of the "power of events on the land (279). For Linenthal, the Enola Gay, an object and a space that housed and dropped an atomic bomb, functioned both to sacralize and the desecrate, and it could not be easily managed. This space was wrought, like the other examples in this issue, with questions of legitimacy, illegitimacy, redemption, terror, and narrative authority. Who makes a space sacred and what are the costs? The confrontations over sacred space, then, provide a way to understand the place of religion in public discourse and its material presence.

[Cross-posted at kellyjbaker.com]

Only St. Jude Can Prevent Forest Fires

Emily Clark

This morning in Tallahassee was wonderfully pleasant in temperature due to storms passing through the area last night. However, the air quality was horrible, as smoke from nearby wildfires covered the city in a smelly haze. The Florida Division of Forestry has deemed wildfires an area hot topic, and a big part of the problem is a drought. Raised in south Texas, I view droughts not as occasional; they’re the normal environmental state of being. But isn’t Florida supposed to get enough rain? I mean, the Everglades and swamps are here. And Florida isn't the only state in a drought. The majority of Texas has been in a severe drought for months, with many places ranking at the highest severity level (exceptional).

When in need of rain, what can mere humans do? Apparently, pray. Just two months ago in April, Texas governor Rick Perry declared “the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas,” and “Texans of all faiths and traditions” were “to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.” Crop failure and wildfires are plaguing the state, and since (according to Perry) “Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer,” it only made sense to pray for rain. In the wake of a hopeless exceptional-ranking drought, prayer would be the answer. Move over Smokey Bear, enter St. Jude.


Perhaps it’s fitting that today I read Robert Orsi’s Thank You St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes as I prepare to take my doctoral comprehensive exams this December. I may not have been in Indy for the RAAC that I have so jealously read reports on from fellow bloggers, but Orsi has been on my mind too. If you haven’t read Thank You St. Jude, I highly recommend it. Personally, I like it better than Madonna of 115^th Street. In it, Orsi investigates the devotional worlds of women who have called upon St. Jude. In doing so, Catholic women (“the immigrants’ daughters”) have appropriated the saint, and Orsi explores how they use their devotions to regain their voices and how their appeals to Jude can also push them further into their state of hopeless despair. In analyzing the functions, results, and workings of the women’s devotions, Orsi in the end embraces the ambivalence of it all. Jude and the women who ask for his intercession live in unstable and “in-between” worlds. The questions of bracketing belief and passing judgments that seem to have come up again at this June’s RAAC (and reminiscent of the famous “Orsi-Prothero Smack-down” in the HDB) permeate the pages of Thank You St. Jude as well. When he laments how a woman asked Jude to keep her husband faithful instead of confronting the husband, is Orsi passing judgment on the oppressive nature of this woman’s devotion or he is simply embracing the “in-between ground” he endorses in Between Heaven and Earth? Truly, the intersubjectivity beloved by anthropologist Michael Jackson remains a blurry area hard to define when deployed in religious studies and American religious history – though it is a task and goal that I love and applaud Orsi and others for engaging.

After finishing Thank You St. Jude, I visited the website for the National Shrine of St. Jude in Chicago that begins Orsi’s narrative, and the shrine is in need of help. In his book, Orsi argues that Jude needs the devotion and sustenance of the women who call on him, just as the women who ask for his help need him. Both the women and Jude inhabit a space of vulnerability – the women at the edge of hopeless despair and Jude the long-forgotten saint who could slip back into obscurity. It seems Jude needs help more than ever right now. Upon opening the shrine’s website, one immediately learns that the shrine is $60,000 under budget and is in need of donations. The shrine is once again selling the healing St. Jude's oil, a product that was not available when Orsi was writing. Another possible way to donate is to electronically purchase a “virtual prayer candle,” which comes complete with a 3, 9, or 30 day novena. Though I am an immigrants’ great-great-granddaughter of German and Czech Catholic heritage, I haven’t purchased one yet. But, perhaps come late fall with a hopelessly large pile of comps reading still to tackle, I might take Jude up on that offer.

A Cheerful and Comfortable Study of Colonial Material Religion

Paul Harvey

Since yesterday I mentioned Lauren Winner's essay in the Sunday Times book review, which reflected on Rob Bell and American conceptions of hell (and heaven), seems like a good time to showcase this review of her new book A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, recently published by Yale -- the review is from Choice.

Winner, Lauren F. A cheerful and comfortable faith: Anglican religious practice in the elite households of eighteenth-century Virginia. Yale, 2010. 272p bibl index afp ISBN 0-300-12469-4, $45.00; ISBN 9780300124699, $45.00. Reviewed in 2011may CHOICE.

This study by Winner (Duke Divinity School) of the domestic religious life of elite families in Colonial Virginia both builds upon and modifies earlier work, including Dell Upton's Holy Things and Profane (1986). As Upton did, Winner focuses primarily on material objects as evidence; however, she deals not with public, male-dominated church buildings but rather with articles found in and around the home: needlework, baptismal bowls, prayer books, articles related to food preparation and consumption, and garments and rings worn in times of mourning. Winner's argues that although their roles were circumscribed, Anglican women nevertheless carved out a sphere in which they subtly contested the authority over religious matters claimed by clergy and male relatives and that their religious life, though not as dramatic as that of their Puritan counterparts, was an authentic appropriation of Anglican tradition in a Colonial setting. Winner's work is thoroughly and imaginatively researched, informed but not overwhelmed by theory, adequately illustrated, and accessibly written. This book is an important contribution to Anglican, elite, Colonial, material, and gendered dimensions of American religious life. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty. -- P. W. Williams, Miami University

Moorish Body Builder and Blood Purifier: From New Contributor Emily Clark!

Welcome to our new contributor Emily Clark! Emily is no stranger here, having tried her hand at a little blogging about the 5th anniversary of Katrina. Emily Clark is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Religion at Florida State University and the current managing editor for the Journal of Southern Religion. Her interests lie in the intersections of race, religion, and everyday life in the American South, particularly in the lives of women in New Orleans.

“Contains No Harmful Drugs”

by Emily Clark

Amassing pieces of material culture from American religion is a hobby of mine. My older sister collects thimbles from various times and places, while I prefer to build a more quirky and eclectic collection. I own a pack of “After the Rapture” mints aimed “for those of us not going anywhere,” and I gaze upon my officemate’s “Buddy Christ” from the movie Dogma with jealousy. While writing a paper last spring semester on the Moorish Science Temple’s Moorish Manufacturing Corporation, my curiosity about the curative and therapeutic products increasingly grew. Though Noble Drew Ali founded the MMC in 1927 and the products largely disappeared after his death, I found a temple in Brooklyn that still sold his teas and tonics. About two weeks ago, my purchase arrived.

Having ordered the Moorish Body-Builder and Blood Purifier with no online description, I was eager to see what exactly I had bought. Containing “No Harmful Drugs,” the label informs the consumer that Noble Drew Ali developed this particular tea to alleviate “rheumatism, lung trouble, run down constitution, indigestion, and loss of manhood.” For the consumption of men, women, and children, the tea is made with “the purest natural herbs.” Inside the box, the loose tea was packaged in a zip-lock sandwich bag. Curious enough, considering their proscription of alcohol, the suggested dose is “one wine glass full, twice daily.” In the maintenance of their bodily purity and good health, MST followers were willing to appropriate non-Moorish tools, from glassware to advertising forums. Advertisements for MMC Products could be found in late 1920s editions of the MST’s newspaper Moorish Guide and in the secular newspaper the Chicago Defender, next to notices for local fortune-tellers, “Mystic Arabian Oil,” and “Oriental Magic Loadstones.”

Though largely overlooked in the historiography on the MST, the products of the MMC offer another method of exploring the Temple’s early days and the everyday life of its adherents. In Edward Curtis’ chapter on the MST in his recent co-edited volume The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religion, he briefly calls attention to the similarities between southern African American traditions of Conjure and the material culture products of the MMC. This proposal is historically plausible and compelling; though, Curtis does not take this idea further. In terms of form, function, and context, a familial resemblance exists between the practices of root-work and Noble Drew Ali’s products. By means of religious knowledge, both attempt to heal black bodies through engagement of both the physical body and spiritual identity. Noble Drew Ali’s vision for “a clean and pure nation” had a material and corporeal grounding in the men, women, and children composing the Moorish race. In the MST’s material culture and theology, the body, spirit, and race impact and influence one other.