SOURCE: “Divinely Subversive,” in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 14, No. 8, May, 1997, pp. 16–17.

In the following review of Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, Caputi shows appreciation for the provocative essays in the collection, but criticizes the brief annotations and the lack of a concluding essay.

My Italian immigrant grandmother, Margaret, was extremely religious, but not the variety I had experienced in Church. She practiced a folk Catholicism that entailed petitions to specific saints and special devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Her bedroom housed scores of statues of these saints as well as many Madonnas. I would sit there for hours, awed. Perhaps that was where I first learned to make altars of my own, always to the Mother, and in my case always outdoors. At the same time, the Church brought out in me a lifelong propensity to rebel. By early adolescence, deeply and...