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Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (review)

question of how and why this kind of religion ever gave way, at least for the “reformations,” to something “modern”? Having retrieved this world of religious “presence” for our understanding, ought we not now go further and try to understand not only its persistence, but also its demise, however periodic or partial that may be? Now, there is a fundamental problem for the study of religion to ponder. So, insofar as the other side of Orsi’s recognition of the religion of presence is absence of curiosity about the religious impulses of reform and modernity, he leaves us with lots of work to do. There is surely much more that is religiously positive to the reforms (and modernity) than their flights from materiality and presence. I mention here only their common orientations to a religion of the heart, the cult of sincerity, the prejudice for the spiritual and internal over the corporeal and public, their virtual apotheosis of the human individual as sacred being, and so on. I think Orsi, for whatever reason, and for good or for ill, has not much cared to understand these things. I find this additionally ironic, since Orsi gives ample evidence that some of the spiritual values “created” by the reformations and Christian humanism are profoundly his as well. Think only of his refusal to violate his individual moral and intellectual conscience in the case of being challenged to pray to St. Jude so that he might understand this devotion. What also makes this interrogation of the reformations salient is that Orsi’s Italian-American religion of “presence” virtually recalls what Bossy terms the “traditional Christianity” that reigned in the West before 1400. Both are religions of presence and relationship between heavenly and earthly beings; both are unapologetically “material” and embodied; both revel in a vivid, often terrifying, and sacred imaginary. Given such identities, we are then thrown backwards into the dawn of the modern era to ask again how and why one kind of religion should have “ended” and the other been born? Today, when resistance to modernism in parts of the Muslim world may be prodding us to puzzle more deeply about reforming religions (and societies) along modernist lines, perhaps it is time to begin to understand the gains and losses of our having done so.