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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.

In 1631, Marie Guyart (later, Marie de l’Incarnation) stepped over the threshold of the Ursuline convent in Tours, into the cloister and out of the world, leaving behind the family business, her aging father and—what jars the modern reader—her eleven-year-old son. The Cruelest of All Mothers examines Marie’s confounding decision to abandon the young Claude, situating the event within the contexts of Marie’s own writings, family life in seventeenth-century France, the Christian tradition, and early modern French spirituality. This book takes up Marie’s decision to abandon Claude as an instance of human agency, arguing that the abandonment is best understood neither as an act of submission to the will of God nor as an act of resistance against the prevailing norms of seventeenth-century French family life, but rather as something in between. Taking its cue from Bourdieu’s understanding of human agency, this book argues that the abandonment is best understood as an event informed by what had been possible within the Christian tradition and inflected by what was likely within the context of seventeenth-century French Catholicism. The final chapter of the book draws on the work of Julia Kristeva to propose how, in another time and place, it might have been possible for Marie to imagine motherhood itself—and not its renunciation—as sacrifice in imitation of Christ.

Ecstasy in the Classroom explores the interface between academic theology and ecstatic experience in the first half of the thirteenth century, which were formative years in the history of the University of Paris, medieval Europe's “fountain of knowledge.” It considers little known and often unedited texts by William of Auxerre, Philip the Chancellor, William of Auvergne, Alexander of Hales (OFM), Roland of Cremona (OP), Hugh of St Cher, and others, to reconstruct the ways in which they addressed questions about Paul’s rapture and other modes of seeing God. As the book’s subtitle suggests, it seeks to do three things. The first is to map and analyze the scholastic discourse of a group of theologians about rapture and other modes of cognition in the first half of the thirteenth century. The second is to explicate the complex, implicit perception of the self they imply and to locate its echoes in contemporary literature, hagiography and other materials. The third is to read these discussions as a window on the predicaments of a newborn community of medieval professionals and thereby elucidate foundational tensions in the emergent academic culture and its social and cultural context. With this triple aim, Ecstasy in the Classroom challenges the often rigid historiographical boundaries between scholastic thought and medieval cultural history and joins the unified approach to intellectual creation, the conditions of its production, and its key instruments.

Neighbors and Missionaries is a history of the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine, a community of women religious founded by Marion Gurney (Mother Marianne of Jesus) in 1910. Believing that she was not called to ministries that involved either parochial education or health care, Mother Marianne and the women who joined her worked with the urban poor in social settlements and staffed religious education classes for children attending public schools. The Sisters of Christian Doctrine established two settlements in New York City, and later expanded their work into South Carolina and Florida. The Horse Creek Valley Welfare Center in South Carolina essentially used the model of social settlements that had been developed for urban areas, but adapted it to the rural South. In addition to offering educational and social programs, the sisters taught catechism classes and prepared children and adults to receive the sacraments. Members of the community also served in a number of parishes where they ministered to black and white Catholics. By the 1960s, settlement houses had been replaced by other types of social welfare programs, and the numbers of American women religious were rapidly decreasing. The concluding chapters of Neighbors and Missionaries explore how the Sisters of Christian Doctrine adapted their ministries to reflect the changes taking place in both the Catholic Church and American society during the second half of the twentieth century.

Remembering Wolsey seeks to contribute to our understanding of historical memory and memorialization bexamining in detail the posthumous commemoration and representation of Thomas Wolsey, the sixteenth-century cardinal, papal legate, and lord chancellor of England. Its questions are at once historical and ethical. Analyzing the history of Wolsey’s legacy from his death in 1530 through the present day, this book shows how images of Wolsey have been among the vehicles through which historians, theologians, and others have contested the events known collectively as the English Reformation(s). Over the course of nearly five centuries, Wolsey has been at the center of the debate about King Henry’s reformation and the virtues and vices of late medieval Catholicism. His name and image have been invoked in a bewildering, and often surprising, variety of contexts, including the works of chroniclers, historians, theologians, dramatists, or more recently screenwriters. Cultural producers have often related the story of Wolsey’s life in ways that have buttressed their preconceived opinions on a wide variety of matters. The complex history of Wolsey’s representation has much to teach us not only about the historiography of the English Reformation but also about broader dynamics of cultural and collective memory.

This book takes the reader beyond the traditional ways through which scholars have viewed and recounted the story of the Catholic Church in America. It covers unfamiliar topics such as anti-Catholicism, rural Catholicism, Latino Catholics, and issues related to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the U.S. government. It continues with fascinating discussions on popular culture (film and literature), women religious, and the work of U.S. missionaries in other countries. The final section of the book is devoted to Catholic social teaching, tackling challenging and sometimes controversial subjects such as the relationship between African American Catholics and the Communist Party, Catholics in the civil rights movement, the abortion debate, issues of war and peace, and Vatican II and the American Catholic Church. The book examines the history of U.S. Catholicism from a variety of perspectives that transcend the familiar account of the immigrant, urban parish, which served as the focus for so many American Catholics during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.

Scholars now concur that the text Ignatius Loyola dictated late in life should not be labeled an autobiography: the existing text does not cover Ignatius's entire life, and he did not write it. Jerónimo Nadal (1507-80), Ignatius's most trusted Jesuit collaborator, urged that the text be titled Acts as the word is used in Luke's Acts of the Apostles. Recent monographs by Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle and John W. O’Malley have characterized Ignatius's Acts as a “mirror of vainglory” and “a mirror of apostolic religious life” respectively. This study argues that an appreciation of the two Lukan New Testament writings likewise helps interpret the theological perspectives of Ignatius. The geography of Luke's two writings and the theology that inspired Luke's redactional innovation assisted Ignatius in remembering and understanding the crucial acts of God in his own life. It also argues that one only appreciates the book by moving forward to Ignatius and his times through the Renaissance, not by viewing backwards through the Reformation. The world-affirming style of holiness to which Ignatius discerned God calling him had much in common with directions born in Italy during the Renaissance. Ignatius's commitment to education, appreciation for the Incarnation and desire for rebirth of the apostolic age reveal a dialogue with the world of Renaissance humanism. The meaning of Ignatius's Acts is best appreciated, then, in the context of the language that he dictated, the events that he chose to include or not include, and the cultures that helped to shape his expression and understanding.