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Parishes are the missing middle in studies of American Catholicism. Between individual Catholics and a global institution, the thousands of local parishes are where Catholicism gets remade. American Parishes showcases what social forces shape parishes, what parishes do, how they do it, and what this says about the future of Catholicism in the United States. Expounding an embedded field approach, this book displays the forces currently reshaping American parishes. It draws from sociology of religion, culture, organizations, and race to illuminate basic parish processes—like leadership and education—and ongoing parish struggles—like conflict and multiculturalism. American Parishes brings together contemporary data, methods, and questions to establish a sociological reengagement with Catholic parishes and a Catholic reengagement with sociological analysis. This book highlights how community, geography, and authority intersect within parishes. It illuminates and analyzes how growing racial diversity, an aging religious population, and neighborhood change influence the inner workings of parishes. Five parts explore thematic topics: (1) seeing parishes with a sociological lens; (2) parish trends; (3) race, class, and diversity in parish life; (4) young Catholics in (and out) of parishes; and (5) the practice and future of a sociology of Catholic parishes. Contributors explore the history of sociological studies on parishes; consider parish research vis-à-vis the larger field of congregational studies; empirically examine parishes using multiple methods; highlight parish diversity and particularity; explore cultural and identity production within parishes; consider the tenuous relationship of younger Catholics to parishes; and provide direction for future sociological research on parishes.

Tradition, secularization and fundamentalism—all three categories are contested, yet in their contestation, they shape our sensibilities and are mutually implicated, the one with the others. The discussion around the mutually implicated meanings of the “secular” and “fundamentalism” bring to the foreground more than ever, and in a way unprecedented in the pre-modern context, the question of what it means to think and live as Tradition. The Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, in particular, have always emphasized Tradition not as a dead letter but as a living presence of the Holy Spirit. But how can we discern when Tradition as living discernment is not fundamentalism? And what does it mean to think as a Tradition and live in Tradition when surrounded by something like the “secular”? The essays in this volume continue both the interrogation of the categories of the “secular” and “fundamentalism,” all the while either implicitly or explicitly exploring ways of thinking about tradition in relation to these interrogations. In this interrogation, however, one witnesses a consensus that whatever the secular or fundamentalism may mean, it is not Tradition, which is historical, particularistic, in motion, ambiguous and pluralistic, while simultaneously not being relativistic. If the wider debates about the secular and fundamentalism seem interminable and often frustrating, perhaps the real contribution of those discussions is a clearer sense of what it means to live and think like—to be as Tradition.

This collection of essays explores how the body became a touchstone for late antique practice and the religious imagination. When we read the stories and testimonies of late ancient Christians, what different types of bodies stand before us in such stories and what do they tell us? How do we understand the range of bodily experiences—solitary and social, private and public—that clothed ancient Christians? How might such experiences and the body as garb itself serve as a productive metaphor by which to explore this attention to matters of gender, religious identity, class, and ethnicity? The essays in this book explore these and related questions through stories from the eastern Christian world of antiquity: monks and martyrs, families and congregations, and textual bodies from antiquity subject to modern interpretations.

This book tells the story of a Jewish Studies that hasn’t yet happened—at least not fully. At bottom, the modest version of a swerve it performs is to ask: what do we mean when we say, “Jewish Studies,” when we conjoin its component terms, when a field takes up its past and projects its future, when we imagine it not as mere amalgam but project? JS offers a unique lens through which to view the horizon of the academic humanities because, though it arrived belatedly, it has spanned a range of disciplinary locations and configurations, from an “origin story” in nineteenth-century historicism and philology to the emancipatory politics of the Enlightenment, to the ethnicity-driven pluralism of the postwar decades, to more recent configurations within an interdisciplinary cultural studies. The conflicted allegiances in respect to traditions, disciplines, divisions, stakes, and stakeholders represent the structural and historical situation of the field as it comes into contact with the humanities more broadly. JSAC reconceives Jewish Studies as an agent of that force Jacques Derrida calls “leverage” both in relation to the humanities and to its own multiple possibilities, its pluralities of position, practice, and method. As one of several images marshaled, the lever functions not just to theorize or conjure JS but to figure it, to recast the enterprise through a series of elastic and catalytic tropes. In that way, the book seeks to harness the dialogical possibilities offered by the evolving collection of forces by which JS is constituted and practiced in order to open, refashion, and exemplify possibilities for a humanities to come.

In a world in which interreligious engagement is both more dangerous and more imperative than ever, and in which the category of “religion” itself has come under increasing scrutiny, the discipline of comparative theology has reemerged as a fruitful strategy that enables one to avoid the most egregious problems of the category of “religion” and to foster encounter between different traditions with attention to particularity. At the same time, in the past few years, scholars of Karl Barth have begun to bring this major twentieth-century Protestant theologian into conversation with religious pluralism. This volume seeks to bring these two scholarly developments together. Featuring contributions from a variety of scholars including Francis Clooney, Mark Heim, Paul Knitter, Anantanand Rambachan, and Randi Rashkover, the volume builds on recent engagements with Barth in the area of theologies of religion and opens a new conversation between Barth’s theology and comparative theology. The opening essay summarizes the intra-Christian conversation about how Barth’s theology can helpfully inform theology of religious pluralism. The bulk of the volume that follows features comparative theological experiments, bringing Barth’s theology into conversation with theological claims from other religious traditions for the purpose of modeling deep learning across religious borders from a Barthian perspective. For each tradition addressed in this volume, two Barth-influenced theologians offer focused engagements of Barth with themes and figures from another religious tradition, with a response from a theologian from that tradition itself. Scant attention has been given to Barth as a conversation partner in the discipline of comparative theology, and we seek to open up new trajectories for comparative theology with this unlikely interlocutor.

Everyone agrees that theology has failed, but the question of how to respond to this failure is contested. Against both radical orthodoxy and deconstructive theology, Rose proposes that Christian identity is constituted by, not despite, failure. Rose shows how the influential work of Slavoj Žižek repeats the original move of Christian mysticism differently, yoking language, desire, and transcendence to a materialist rather than a Neoplatonist account of the world. Tracing these themes through the Dionysius, Derrida, and contemporary debates about the gift, violence, and revolution, Rose’s critical theological engagement with Žižek helps makes possible a materialist reading of Christianity. The Christian mystical tradition begins with Dionysius the Areopagite’s uncomfortable but productive conjunction of Christian theology and Neoplatonism. The tensions generated by this are central to Dionysius’s legacy, visible not only in subsequent theological thought but also in much twentieth-century continental philosophy as it seeks to disentangle itself from its Christian ancestry. A Theology of Failure shows how the work of Slavoj Žižek represents an attempt to repeat the original move of Christian mystical theology, bringing together the themes of language, desire, and transcendence not with Neoplatonism but with a materialist account of the world. Tracing these themes through the work of Dionysius and Derrida and through contemporary debates about the gift, violence, and revolution, this book offers a critical theological engagement with Žižek’s account of social and political transformation, showing how Žižek’s work makes possible a materialist reading of apophatic theology and Christian identity.