Robert Anthony Orsi (born 1953) is a scholar of American history and Catholic studies who is the Grace Craddock Nagle Chair professor at Northwestern University.[1]
Orsi was born and raised in the Bronx, New York City. He majored in religion and sociology at Trinity College in Connecticut and graduated salutatorian in 1975, receiving both a Danforth and Watson Scholarship. He attended graduate school in religion at Yale University where his prize-winning dissertation formed the basis of his first book, The Madonna of 115th Street.
He taught at Fordham University at Lincoln Center from 1981 to 1988, at Indiana University from 1988 to 2001, and Harvard University and Harvard Divinity School from 2001 to 2007.[2] From 2020 to 2021, he was a Faculty Fellow at the University of Notre Dame.[3]
He currently teaches at Northwestern University where he is the Grace Craddock Nagle Chair of Catholic Studies.[4]
He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies (2011) and the author of History and Presence (2016).
Orsi has been noted for a controversy concerning methodology in the field of religious studies between himself and Russell McCutcheon. This controversy centered on a rather polemical exchange between the two, with Orsi referring to McCutcheon's book, The Discipline of Religion, as "chilling".[5] Orsi also made the comment, "the assumption appears to be that the scholar of religion by virtue of his or her normative epistemology, theoretical acuity, and political knowingness, has the authority and the right to make the lives of others the objects of his or her scrutiny. He or she theorizes them." McCutcheon responded with a paper included in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion entitled, "It's a Lie. There's No Truth in It! It's a Sin! On the Limits of the Humanistic Study of Religion and the Costs of Saving Others from Themselves".[6]