About This Issue

Abstract

About This Issue David J. Endres In the past decades, cultural and demographic shifts have significantly reshaped U.S. Catholic parish life. Thousands of parishes have been closed or consolidated, mostly in New England and the Great Lakes states. At the same time, new congregations have formed in the American South and Southwest, especially as immigration and regional relocation has brought new and larger populations. This theme issue explores parishes and the communities they serve. It is particularly attentive to the realities of growth and decline and the role of race and ethnicity in those shifts. Worth K. Hayes is associate professor of history and Director of Academic and Learning Outcomes at Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama. Joshua Alan Hoxmeier is a doctoral student in the department of history at the University of Illinois Chicago. Madeline Gambino is an adjunct professor of religious studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and the assistant director of the Moravian Historical Society in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Susan Bigelow Reynolds is assistant professor of Catholic Studies at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Tricia C. Bruce is a sociologist with the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana. Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press