“’There is a Church west of Buffalo!’”: Catholic Studies and Regional Identity”

[Scott1]

For all the talk about globalization and a shrinking world, regional location and identity still matter—to international politics, to the arts, and to the practice of religion. As Belden Lane argued in Landscapes of the Sacred, particular locations, around which localized cultures grow, provide the foundation for religious experience. Location differentiates American Catholics from each other in a variety of ways. Consider, for example, what people wear to Mass. A good friend who has lived in the South, the Midwest, and New England once observed that American Catholic liturgical attire appears to be “strangely contrary to climate. In New England--shorts and T-shirts. In Louisiana--suits.” But for the most part, scholars of American Catholicism seem impervious to such regional distinctions, continuing to posit an urban northeastern reality and shoehorning in dissenting perspectives. Contemporary intellectuals follow suit in their persistent assumption that the urban northeast is normative. A recent study of Commonweal’s readership, for example, elicited the reminder that “There is a church west of Buffalo!”

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