What does it mean to be—or to have been raised—Catholic in America today, now that formally nonpracticing Catholics outnumber the memberships of any other single denomination? Catholic Lives, Contemporary America is a collection of informed and spirited essays focusing on Catholic lay practices not commonly recognized or, at times, officially sanctioned. For the formidable array of scholars and writers gathered here, being Catholic is not simply a matter of going to confession or attending Mass, and Catholicism’s contributions to American cultural identity remain open to question.
Edited and with an introduction by Thomas J. Ferraro, Catholic Lives, Contemporary America offers a banquet of essays and interviews, at once subtle and accessible, treating American Catholic lives and legacies with compassion and flair.

Contributors. Patrick Allitt, Paul Crowley, Thomas J. Ferraro, James T. Fisher, Paul Giles, Mary Gordon, Stanley Hauerwas, Frank Lentricchia, Robert A. Orsi, Camille Paglia, David Plante, Richard Rodriguez, Kathy Rudy, Andrew Sullivan, Mary Jo Weaver

Ethnic literature figures prominently in the current debate on multiculturalism, but even its supporters have had little to say about it as literature, stressing instead its political and sociological context. Thomas J. Ferraro, in this lively and accessible study of modern fiction by Americans of immigrant background, argues that the best of these stories demand—and reward—close reading and attention to questions of genre and literary form.

Ferraro engages the literature of immigration and mobility by asking what motivates its authors and what their work actually accomplishes. He concentrates on five diverse examples of the "up-from-the-ghetto" narrative: Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, Henry Miller's "The Tailor Shop," and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. To Ferraro the unsuspected value of these works is that they recast the conventions of ethnic representation, illustrating the power of ethnic writing to capture and redirect the national literary imagination.

Ferraro's sharply observed reading of these five works shows how such reenactments of immigrant mobility test the ideology of assimilation against the writer's experience. Ethnic Passages will refocus discussion of how literature addresses the American conflict between ethnic heritage and the greater opportunities of "mainstream" society.