Publishers Weekly - August 28, 2017

Author Profile

tricks on the eye. Now, the internet is both history’s greatest repository of knowledge and, at the same time, a petri dish for cultivating conspiracy theories like the Pizzagate hoax propagated via social media. “We are in this moment that’s much like the 19th century, when new technologies challenged us to think about belief and perception and truth in new ways,” Manseau says.

The historian in Manseau can’t resist pointing out that we’re
a nation of true believers, and always have been. “We like to
believe all kinds of things,” he says. “It makes life interesting.”
In the testimony from Puritan witch trials, he points out, “you
find these remarkable collections of beliefs that people are jum-
bling together and calling Christianity—collections of folk
beliefs from England mingling with beliefs and practices from
the Caribbean and South America and Africa.”
Manseau’s own relationship to belief
is rich and strange. As the son of a
former nun and a priest who never
renounced his vows, he is ex damnato
coitu–the fruit of a “damned union”—
in the judgment of the Catholic
Church. Though officially “under sus-
pension,” his father refused to stop
ministering to the urban poor in his
storefront church in Roxbury, Boston,
an abandoned funeral parlor that still
reeked of embalming fluid.

As Manseau recounts in his unsparing tale of family, faith, and broken faith, Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun and Their Son (2005), when he “reached the age of teenage dissent” he turned his back on the religion that twined around his family tree like ivy, running through the lives of 300 years’ worth of Irish and French Catholic nuns and priests. “I was driven away from my Catholic upbringing,” he writes, “by a sense that as a family we were in the faith but not of it; a nagging feeling that the church we were raised to place at the center of our lives did not in fact want us.” Later, Manseau learned that both his parents were molested by priests—a revelation that makes their unshakable faith all the more miraculous.

Even though Manseau lost his religion, religion never lost him. It has followed him all his days, from his undergraduate years as a religion and literature major at UMass to “a dissertation on Yiddish literature at a Jesuit university” (as Manseau described his doctoral studies at Georgetown in a New York Times essay) to his current job at the Smithsonian.

All of Manseau’s half-dozen books touch on religion, in one
way or another. His novel Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter (2008)
is a Chagall painting in prose about the last Yiddish poet in
America. Yiddish literature—a “literature written in large part
by the disaffected sons of rabbis,” he notes, with a laugh—
“really resonated with me as the son of a former priest,” he says.
“These Yiddish writers, when they decided that they were
trying to get away from their traditional upbringing, they
didn’t not write about it anymore; that became the subject
of all their stories. That’s the kind of writer I ended up becoming.
Though I did not ultimately come to think of myself as a
religious person, that became a real driver of everything that I
was writing.”

Rag and Bone (2009) is a wry meditation on the power of relics—the severed hand of a nun, a hair from Muhammad’s beard—to electrify the faithful. One Nation, Under Gods (2015), And what does he believe, this lapsed Catholic and son of a former nun and a priest who defied his church? Manseau is thoughtful. Like the American grab-bag version of Christianity, he’s “a product of all my many influences,” he decides. From his Catholic upbringing,

he retains a profound sympathy for what scholars call “material culture,” in his case “the prayer cards and the rosaries and the vestments my father kept in the front hall closet, things that served a vital purpose in the most private and important part of the lives of those who were most important to me.” It’s an affinity that serves him well as a curator, telling stories with objects.

Then, too, Manseau believes in language. “One significant part of my upbringing was this understanding that words were a technology that allowed you to access the sacred,” he says. “As much as I found Catholic mass boring when I was young, it still gave me the understanding that we were there to say words in a particular order and that was going to allow us to experience something, and as a child that was very moving. I am an oral writer: I write and then I read it aloud and then I edit it; I’m going for a quality where you feel spoken to.” ;

Mark Dery is the author of the essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts (Univ. of Minnesota, 2012) and a forthcoming biography of Edward Gorey (Little, Brown; 2018).