Vernacular Religion: Collected Essays of Leonard Norman Primiano ed. by Deborah Dash Moore (review)

Reviewed by: Vernacular Religion: Collected Essays of Leonard Norman Primiano ed. by Deborah Dash Moore Nancy L. Watterson Vernacular Religion: Collected Essays of Leonard Norman Primiano. Edited by Deborah Dash Moore. New York: NYU Press, 2022. 328 pp. $89.00. The book's title captures both the topic and the leading scholar of religious study whose lifework made both visible and palpable the practice of Vernacular Religion, Leonard Norman Primiano. Primiano, who died in 2021, was long-time Chair and Professor of Religious Studies at Cabrini College (later University). Deborah Dash Moore has gathered a broad spectrum of Primiano's scholarly essays (from 1995 to 2018) and frames their importance to various disciplines, especially Religious Studies and Folklore and Folklife Studies, fields in which Primiano was a preeminent contributor and thought leader. Moore's careful selection and arrangement of Primiano's work exemplifies how his training in folklife studies and his ethnographic / ethnological attention to "the nuances of everyday life" (xi) give rise to his conceptualization of "vernacular religion"—an inestimable contribution of perspective, method, and application of theory. The twelve essays (and a coda) that follow the introduction (Primiano's seminal 1995 article "Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife") magnify how the scholar's wide-ranging interests spanned cultures, ethnicities, national and linguistic boundaries, social classes, educational upbringing, and belief traditions. Each essay invites readers to step into printed, artifactual, performative perspectives—revealing "religion" not as static nor dogmatic but as living worldviews. Sometimes these exemplars are shaped by organized religion and sectarian politics, yet often they transcend boundaries and blur categories through Primiano's deft description and analyses of ideas and practices—spiritual, aesthetic, economic, political. After the Introduction, the volume is divided into three parts: Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife; Dignity in Philadelphia; and Father and Mother Divine. There are substantive notes, reading suggestions, and sixteen beautiful color photographs illustrating material cultural selections from the essays. In Part I, readers are treated to five distinctive case studies revolving around the materiality and creative expressions of devotion that often accompany vernacular religious cultures—from the hooked rug traditions of Sister Ann Ameen in Newfoundland to altars and vows honoring St. [End Page 77] Joseph in Sicilian American homes, to the use of holy cards and exvotos in Roman Catholic culture. Part II opens with "The Gay God of the City: The Emergence of the Gay and Lesbian Ethnic Parish," and sets the framework for exploring how lay participants of the "Dignity" movement employ creative expressions of Catholicism as they seek ways to reconcile the church's hierarchical and normative rules around homosexuality. Part III revolves around pieces that place Father Divine's International Peace Mission Movement at the center, looking at this American sectarian religious tradition and small cadre of celibate followers as they practice their living tradition in Philadelphia. Based on years of careful, respectful fieldwork, Primiano brings to life their belief in abundance as testimony to Father Divine's divinity: music, food-ways, ritual communion banquets, and architecture mark this group's living expression of its founder's legacy. As with the Dignity movement essays, Primiano's writing offers both analysis and a study in respectful engagement with complex and creative belief traditions. Moore's book is a valuable resource for its multi-faceted approach to diverse examples of religion in everyday life. These essays will be of interest to anyone studying contemporary religion. Primiano's work offers a distinctive analysis of Catholicism with fresh—even unexpected—examples of devotion that offer ways of feeling and experiencing God in all things. Importantly, this volume represents a framework and method for intersectional research: disciplinary boundary-blurring and bridge-building. Primiano unfolds an approach that ultimately embodies true inclusivity—widening one's wonder to appreciate the varieties of human experience—and provides an exemplar of ethnological study of any group—its practices, objects, and means of expressing identity. It is a useful vehicle for engaging students of culture and religion in a method consonant with valuing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging; each chapter is impelled by beliefs as expressed, enacted, contested, re-purposed, maintained, and perpetuated. Teachers of American...

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