American Patroness is a remarkable and timely collection of essays that reframe American religion through the histories, experiences, politics, and imaginations of Marian shrines. Its essays go far beyond documenting the existence of these material touchstones of Catholic faith to demonstrate the richness of Catholic devotional culture to the formation of American identities writ large. One need not specialize in Catholic studies to benefit from the volume's robust analyses of immigration, white supremacy, gender, ritual, authority, and space and place. Like the shrines to Mary in her many appearances across the United States, American Patroness draws us in to the lived experiences of devotional practice and embodied encounter that refuse our tidy categories of intellectual analysis.---Rachel McBride Lindsey, Associate Professor of American Religion and Culture and Director of Lived Religion in the Digital Age, Saint Louis University
Marian shrines connect Catholics to each other and to a past replete with meaning and emotion. American Patroness explores twelve sites of Marian devotion, uncovering worlds of cultural, ethnic, and creative variety. Reading American Patroness is like taking a trip through American Catholic history, as witnessed by those who devote themselves to the Virgin Mary and who call the United States home.---Michael Pasquier, Professor Religious Studies and History, Louisiana State University
American Patroness is beautiful in its multiplicity. This is much more than a book on Marian shrines, it is a book that explores Catholic devotion in its radical, conservative, and irreverent registers. Here we find informal shrines made from murals and underpasses, and shrines in their most triumphalist institutional forms--each offering a different vision of what it means to be Catholic in the US. Across these shrinescapes, Catholics work out approaches to immigration, disability, reproductive politics and gentrification. Shrines are no quaint remnants of a Catholic devotional past, but a key, mutable resource for exploring the contours of Catholicism in our contemporary world.---Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada, author of Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of Marian shrine devotionalism that I have read, and I urge everyone interested in understanding the enduring power and persistence of shrines devoted to the Virgin Mary to read this book. American Patroness is an exciting and important new collection that features top scholars of Catholicism who effectively translate the power and beauty of belief, prayer, and community in shared and communal spaces. Deeply researched and clearly written and excellent for class use.---Kristy Nabhan-Warren, author of Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland
American Patroness is a major contribution to the study of US Catholicism and American religion. The helpful introduction and vivid case studies offer surprising insights about the complexity and vitality of devotion today, not only at traditional shrines but also tourist sites, urban underpasses, and digital spaces. Indispensable for specialists but of interest to everyone who wants to know more about the contemporary religious landscape.---Thomas A. Tweed, author of Religion: A Very Short Introduction
Mary tumbles into material existence at shrines throughout the United States, where devotees celebrate her special powers to help navigate their lives. In American Patroness, we finally have an interdisciplinary collection of studies of Marian "shrinescapes," from old revered churches to new highway underpasses, in all their endurance, adaptability, mess, and excess. Particularly wonderful is the metaphor of "conversation" used by editors Katherine Dugan and Karen E. Park--a theoretical innovation that invites us to "start anywhere" in understanding places that "pile on" many meanings, including multiple Marys. Anyone interested in US religion will be lucky to tumble into this critical new analysis of Mary's reach and importance in America. Start anywhere, but get in on the conversation.---Julie Byrne, Msgr. Thomas J. Hartman Chair of Catholic Studies at Hofstra University
