BiblioVault - Books about Christian Church

Native American Catholic Studies Reader

History and Theology

David J. Endres

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

Before there was an immigrant American Church, there was a Native American Church. The Native American Catholic Studies Reader offers an introduction to the story of how Native American Catholicism has developed over the centuries, beginning with the age of the missions and leading to inculturated, indigenous forms of religious expression. Though the Native-Christian relationship could be marked by tension, coercion, and even violence, the Christian faith took root among Native Americans and for those who accepted it and bequeathed it to future generations it became not an imposition, but a way of expressing Native identity. From the perspective of historians and theologians, the Native American Catholic Studies Reader offers a curated collection of essays divided into three sections: education and evangelization; tradition and transition; and Native American lives. Contributors include scholars currently working in the field: Mark Clatterbuck, Damian Costello, Conor J. Donnan, Ross Enochs, Allan Greer, Mark G. Thiel, and Christopher Vecsey, as well as selections from a past generation: Gerald McKevitt, SJ, and Carl F. Starkloff, SJ. These contributions explore the interaction of missionaries and tribal leaders, the relationship of traditional Native cosmology and religiosity to Christianity, and the role of geography and tribal consciousness in accepting and maintaining indigenous and religious identities. These readings highlight the state of the emergent field of Native-Catholic studies and suggest further avenues for research and publication. For scholars, teachers, and students, the Native American Catholic Studies Reader explores how the faith of the American Church’s eldest members became a means of expressing and celebrating language, family, and tribe.

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Navigating Reformed Identity in the Rural Dutch Republic

Communities, Belief, and Piety

Kyle Dieleman

Amsterdam University Press, 2023

Through an examination of Dutch Reformed church records and theological texts, Kyle Dieleman explores the local dynamics of religious life in the early modern Dutch Republic. The book argues that within the religiously plural setting of the Dutch Republic church officials used a variety of means to establish a Reformed identity in their communities. As such, the book explores the topics of church orders, elders and deacons, intra-confessional and inter-confessional conflicts, and Sabbath observance as local means by which small, rural communities negotiated and experienced their religious lives. In exploring rural Dutch Reformed congregations, the book examines the complicated relationships between theology and practice and ‘lay’ and ‘elite’ religion and highlights challenges rural churches faced. As they faced these issues, Dieleman demonstrates that local congregations exercised agency within their lived religious experiences as they sought unique ways to navigate their own Reformed identity within their small, rural communities.

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No Closure

Catholic Practice and Boston's Parish Shutdowns

John C. Seitz

Harvard University Press, 2011

In 2004 the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston announced plans to close or merge more than eighty parish churches. Scores of Catholics—28,000, by the archdiocese’s count—would be asked to leave their parishes. The closures came just two years after the first major revelations of clergy sexual abuse and its cover up. Wounds from this profound betrayal of trust had not healed.

In the months that followed, distraught parishioners occupied several churches in opposition to the closure decrees. Why did these accidental activists resist the parish closures, and what do their actions and reactions tell us about modern American Catholicism? Drawing on extensive fieldwork and with careful attention to Boston’s Catholic history, Seitz tells the stories of resisting Catholics in their own words, and illuminates how they were drawn to reconsider the past and its meanings. We hear them reflect on their parishes and the sacred objects and memories they hold, on the way their personal histories connect with the history of their neighborhood churches, and on the structures of authority in Catholicism.

Resisters describe how they took their parishes and religious lives into their own hands, and how they struggled with everyday theological questions of respect and memory; with relationships among religion, community, place, and comfort; and with the meaning of the local church. No Closure is a story of local drama and pathos, but also a path of inquiry into broader questions of tradition and change as they shape Catholics’ ability to make sense of their lives in a secular world.

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The Noble Army

The Modern Martyrs of Westminster Abbey

Edited by James Hawkey

Haus Publishing, 2024

The narratives of the figures behind the ten statues of martyrs at the Westminster Abbey.

In July 1998, ten statues of martyrs of the twentieth century were unveiled surmounting the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey. Ten figures were identified from different continents and different churches: victims of Nazi and Bolshevik oppression, state-sponsored violence, and religious hatred, these images stand as a testimony to the bloodshed of the twentieth century. Some, such as Oscar Romero and Martin Luther King, are famed across the world. Others are less known.

The Noble Army offers reflections on each of these ten lives, explores the questions surrounding their choices, and tells us the stories behind them. These statues were intended to represent those millions of individuals who suffered for their faith in Christ in the twentieth century. These reflections culminate in a chapter on the contemporary reality of Christian marginalization and persecution, written by Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil, Iraq.

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Nuns Behaving Badly

Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy

Craig A. Monson

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Witchcraft. Arson. Going AWOL. Some nuns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy strayed far from the paradigms of monastic life. Cloistered in convents, subjected to stifling hierarchy, repressed, and occasionally persecuted by their male superiors, these women circumvented authority in sometimes extraordinary ways. But tales of their transgressions have long been buried in the Vatican Secret Archive. That is, until now.

In Nuns Behaving Badly, Craig A. Monson resurrects forgotten tales and restores to life the long-silent voices of these cloistered heroines. Here we meet nuns who dared speak out about physical assault and sexual impropriety (some real, some imagined). Others were only guilty of misjudgment or defacing valuable artwork that offended their sensibilities. But what unites the women and their stories is the challenges they faced: these were women trying to find their way within the Catholicism of their day and through the strict limits it imposed on them. Monson introduces us to women who were occasionally desperate to flee cloistered life, as when an entire community conspired to torch their convent and be set free. But more often, he shows us nuns just trying to live their lives. When they were crossed—by powerful priests who claimed to know what was best for them—bad behavior could escalate from mere troublemaking to open confrontation.

In resurrecting these long-forgotten tales and trials, Monson also draws attention to the predicament of modern religious women, whose “misbehavior”—seeking ordination as priests or refusing to give up their endowments to pay for priestly wrongdoing in their own archdioceses—continues even today. The nuns of early modern Italy, Monson shows, set the standard for religious transgression in their own age—and beyond.

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