Lifeblood of the Parish

A New York City ethnography that explores men's unique approaches to Catholic devotionEvery Saturday, and sometimes on weekday evenings, a group of men in old clothes can be found in the basement of the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Each year the parish hosts the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and San Paolino di Nola. Its crowning event is the Dance of the Giglio, where the men lift a seventy-foot tall, four-ton tower through the streets, bearing its weight on their shoulders.Drawing on six years of research, Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada reveals the making of this Italian American tower, as the men work year-round to prepare for the Feast. She argues that by paying attention to this behind-the-scenes activity, largely overlooked devotional practices shed new light on how men embody and enact their religiosity in sometimes unexpected ways.Lifeblood of the Parish evocatively and accessibly presents the sensory and material world of Catholicism in Brooklyn, where religion is raucous and playful. Maldonado-Estrada here offers a new lens through which to understand men’s religious practice, showing how men and boys become socialized into their tradition and express devotion through unexpected acts like painting, woodworking, fundraising, and sporting tattoos. These practices, though not usually considered religious, are central to the ways the men she studied embodied their Catholic identity and formed bonds to the church.

Offers readers a look into a complicated history between various cultures and communities, one collectively built up over decades and, quite literally, on the shoulders of men. Maldonado-Estrada complicates what masculinity looks like in the Catholic Church, marking it as a process that occurs over years of piety, devotion, but above all work., Lifeblood of the Parish is a thoroughly researched, impressively crafted, and beautifully written contribution to the study of religious practice. Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada takes us into the behind-the-scenes places where it becomes possible to understand the relationships of masculinity, ethnicity, and Catholic devotion in new ways. I enthusiastically recommend it to urban sociologists and anthropologists as well as to scholars of religion., Lifeblood of the Parish is a beautifully crafted ethnography of men’s devotions, the power of place, and the bonds of friendship. This is, without a doubt, the best study of men and religion I’ve ever read. Dr. Maldonado-Estrada has set a very high bar for scholars of religion, and I thank her for this exceptional book., In Lifeblood of the Parish, Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada presents a rich ethnography of Catholic men in Brooklyn crafting their masculinity in tattoos, costumed re-enactments, and the production of devotional artifacts. Devotion, she persuasively argues, is not just prayer and affection for the saints. It is the very production of masculinity. A remarkable contribution to the study of lived religion and its material culture, this book shows how fundamental gender, ethnicity, and community are to understanding religion as material practice., In this deeply immersive ethnography, Maldonado-Estrada shows how the men of Italian Williamsburg create and perform themselves as men in their fierce devotion to each other, to the neighborhood, and especially to the work of staging of the annual feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. For all its joyful masculine exuberance, Maldonado-Estrada is unflinching in her treatment of the event’s racist undertow and homophobia, its exclusion of women, and its ugliness towards upper-middle class newcomers to Brooklyn. There is no better book about the fate of Italian American working-class masculinity and religion in the neoliberal fever dream that is New York City today than Lifeblood of the Parish. This is a major contribution to the literature of contemporary urban religion.

Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Kalamazoo College. She hails from New York City’s Lower East Side.