Lexington Books
Pages: 256
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9½
978-1-4985-2355-4 • Hardback • December 2015 • $128.00 • (£98.00)
978-1-4985-2356-1 • eBook • December 2015 • $121.50 • (£94.00)
Jill M. Krebs is academic programs coordinator at McDaniel College.
“It’s probably about the most Catholic town in America”: Introduction- “The holiness was palpable”: The Apparitions and Catholics in Context
- “It is holy ground”: Miracles and Visionary Culture Identity
- “Our Lady’s got that maternal thing”: Relationships with Our Lady in Visionary Culture
- “It hasn’t made me think that I’m not a good Catholic”: Visionary Culture Identity in the Catholic Institutional Framework
- “The truth of God must erupt as a volcano”: New Social Media and Global Catholicism
“If it’s true or if it’s not true really doesn’t matter to me”: Conclusions
Krebs’s Our Lady of Emmitsburg, Visionary Culture, and Catholic Identity: Seeing and Believing is a thorough study of the Catholic community that surrounds Our Lady of Emmitsburg. With this book, Krebs contributes to scholarship on Marian devotion and contemporary Catholicism in the United States, as well as to an increasing interest in prayer practices among scholars of religion.... Throughout this text, Krebs works carefully to point out the many binaries collapsed by the people in her study: between enchantment and modernity, between miraculous and empirical, between pre- and post-Vatican II, and between popular and official religion. The pay-off of this attention to nuance is a rich portrait of an under-studied subculture in contemporary American Catholicism.
— Reading Religion
Our Lady of Emmitsburg is a rich ethnographic account of an apparitional movement surrounding the visions of Giana Talone Sullivan, a Marian seer from Emmitsburg, Maryland.... Our Lady of Emmitsburg is the definitive work on an important Marian apparition. It is also required reading for anyone doing work on Marian apparitions or lived religion approaches to daily experiences of the supernatural. But perhaps the most important contribution of this work is that it models how to do ethnography about beliefs and practices that people are not comfortable discussing. This sort of work is necessary if we are ever to have an accurate understanding of the religious landscape.
— American Catholic Studies
The book is supported by a strong methodological section discussing the suspension of disbelief and the role of outsider-insider Krebs herself assumed as an ethnographer.... Krebs’ book is an extremely valuable addition to the literature on Marian apparitions, and will be read with interest by both scholars of Catholicism and of contemporary religious movements.
— Nova Religio: The Journal Of Alternative And Emergent Religions
Our Lady of Emmitsburg is a lovingly crafted and well-written account of an extraordinary woman, her apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and their devotees. Jill Krebs is a scholar who takes her interlocutors seriously. She listens to them, engages with them, shares her own thoughts with them. This is a wonderful study that methodologically shows us what engaged, embodied, and reciprocal ethnography can be. Krebs offers us a compelling and very important book about people whose beliefs and faith are made palpable to the reader. I highly recommend it.
— Kristy Nabhan-Warren, University of Iowa
Our Lady of Emmitsburg is the most insightfully described and theoretically informed accounts of one of America’s premier Marian apparition sites.
— David G. Bromley, founder and director, World Religions and Spirituality Project
Our Lady of Emmitsburg will be an important book in the corpus of scholarship on Marian devotion in general and Marian apparitions in particular. [It is] well researched, well organized, and engagingly written… the real and lasting contribution of this book comes in the author’s elucidation of the visual culture of apparition devotees.
— Sandra Zimdars-Swartz, University of Kansas
This excellent study should serve as a model for future scholarship on Marian apparitions and other visionary religious phenomena.
— Religious Studies Review