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Sciorra spent thirty-five years researching these community art forms and interviewing Italian immigrant and U.S.-born Catholics.

Joseph Sciorra's Built with Faith offers a place-centric, ethnographic study of the religious material culture of New York City's Italian American Catholics. Such ethnic building traditions and urban ethnic landscapes have long been neglected by all but a few scholars. These spaces exist outside of but in relationship to the consecrated halls of local parishes and are sites of worship in conventionally secular locations. Over the course of 130 years, Italian American Catholics in New York City have developed a varied repertoire of devotional art and architecture to create community-based sacred spaces in their homes and neighborhoods. In short, the Delaware Estuary’s reach within Philadelphia’s metropolitan sphere was critically influenced by environmental experience forged in the cultural landscapes of African Americans. From this perspective, African Americans and their cultural landscapes inextricably arbitrated the harvesting, processing, knowledge, commodity flow, and consumption of the region’s signature marine resources. Working landscapes inspired these and other depictions, assemblages of buildings, boats, harvesting technology, housing, and marketplaces where African Americans honed their environmental acumen in the context of industrial, consumer, and racialized sentiment. This legacy has been visible principally through Thomas Eakins’s well-known scenes depicting African Americans working in the region’s shad fisheries or guiding railbird hunters through once bountiful wild rice areas and marsh. Within Philadelphia’s Middle Atlantic orbit, African Americans long participated in the environmental dynamics and transformation of the region defined by the Delaware Estuary and the use of its marine resources. But few studies have made African American cultural landscapes-specifically, those places heavily shaped by African American labor-the focus of efforts to better understand the black community’s environmental experience and its wider societal relevance. African American work patterns, particularly those concerned with the handling and extraction of natural resources or labor in agricultural or industrial settings, have been at the heart of efforts to better understand black environmental experience.