In the Catholic tradition, rosaries are intended to help users contemplate four “mysteries”-joyful, sorrowful, glorious, and luminous. The beads and chains of these prayer tools were and are also made of a variety of materials- gold, coral, glass, and seed, to name a few-across the United States and across time, the diversity of styles and of American Catholic experiences captured in the museum’s religion collection. In the case of these objects, beads, medals, or knots appear at regular intervals along a string or chain, each one connoting a prayer and instilling a specific rhythm to an observer’s worship. Rosaries are designed as devotionals, or religious objects like scapulars, holy medals, and crucifixes that are carried by the religious as part of their worship. I speak from experience, but also with a passion for studying the objects that surround all American religious experience. She held tightly to it during her fight with breast cancer, the beads’ paint worn off from use. It was my grandmother’s rosary, given to me by my dad. My most valuable rosary, however, is one that was not originally mine. I distinctly remember a woman who hand-crated rosaries at my parish coming to my house in second grade, allowing me to pick out the bead and chain color for my First Communion rosary.

I was raised in a devout Catholic family, and some of my earliest memories are of receiving rosaries.

Although rosaries and prayer beads are not limited to Catholicism-many religions use them in everyday practice, including the Episcopal and Orthodox churches, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and more-the museum's collection particularly captures the diversity of American Catholicism and the people who make use of rosaries as part of their faith: from a World War II chaplain to a famous jazz musician to a meteorologist tracking a category five hurricane.

Rosaries or prayer beads are an essential part of American material religion, the study of the objects, icons, images, and spaces of religious practice in the United States.

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