Reviews for Osiris The Egyptian Religion of Resurrection

The average rating for Osiris The Egyptian Religion of Resurrection based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-08-09 00:00:00 Gina Wooten I first heard about the Healy family in a grad school class taught by the author. He shared some of his research for the book which he published a year after I finished my masters degree. Now 18+ years after taking that course I *finally* got a copy of this book and read it. The Healy family consisted of 9 children born to an Irish Catholic Georgia planter and how common law slave wife Eliza. Unlike most children of such unions in the slave South, Michael Morris Healy claimed these children and his "good woman Eliza" and made provisions for his children to escape the fate of servitude by arranging for education in the North and essential adoption by the Catholic community there. Three of the sons and two of the daughters who lived into adulthood chose religious vocations, and the institution of the Church essentially sheltered them from racial questioning. Shielded by the high status of their bishop brothers those who did not take on religious orders still managed to enter the white community. Those who married had white spouses. O'Toole argues using his thorough research and important societal context what a feat it was for these siblings to accomplish what they did, this also Illuminating racial attitudes of the 19th century. It's an interesting look at race that raises important questions over 100 years after the last Healy sibling died.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-11-04 00:00:00 Davis Woodbury Last decade I remember thinking, “Why would anyone want to revisit the story of the Healy family?” I felt like the Healy stories had already been told by Albert S. Foley, SJ, a scholar and activist whose career I knew very well. The Healys were nine offspring of a natural marriage between plantation owner, Michael Healy, and his slave Eliza. Healy took great pains to circumvent Georgia laws that would have doomed his children to be slaves after his own death. He managed to get them all educated in the North. Three of them became Catholic priests, two of them became Catholic nuns, and the others married and had offspring, so that by the next generation the Healy family had successfully covered up that it had any African blood at all. Foley had devoted a book to each of the sons who became Catholic priests, including Bishop Healy: Beloved Outcaste (1954) that became a Catholic bestseller. Well, it only took a few pages for Professor O’Toole’s book, Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family (2002) to convince me that I needed to rethink the Healy family and the books that had been written about them. O’Toole depicted most clearly how difficult it was for the Healy offspring to successfully pass for white, even in New York, Boston, and Montreal, the cities where they had their earliest schooling. O’Toole explained convincingly how the religious vocations of the three males and two (almost three) females was all tied up in their individual quests to pass the color bar at almost any price. Since their slave ancestry would have been most obvious when they were all seen together as a group, it is truly amazing how close they remained as a family once their parents were deceased. The Healys took advantage of every educational opportunity that the Catholic Church had to offer. They also had the benefit of prelates in Boston who actively encouraged their vocations and even smoothed out obstacles that would have prevented the males from entering the Catholic priesthood. When they entered service in a diocese, they were already more educated than most clergy. One of the darkest (most obviously giving evidence of African blood) was Alexander Sherwood Healy, who managed to earn doctorates in canon law and moral theology before starting his duties in the diocese of Boston. Everyone recognized his superior ability at preaching, choral direction, administration, and he eventually became pastor of one of the largest parishes in Reconstruction-era Boston. I came to realize that Foley’s books had focused on the three priests, to the exclusion of the younger siblings. O’Toole showed how successful all the members of the family eventually became and how each family member embraced choices that would protect them from stigma in that age of having African blood in their veins. This is a work of superb scholarship, but I found it a compelling read as well.