Fordham University Press Research Articles

The Garb of Being: Embodiment and the Pursuit of Holiness in Late Ancient Christianity. Edited by Georgia Frank, Susan R. Holman, and Andrew S. Jacobs. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. xi + 384 pp. $65.00 hardcover.

The Garb of Being: Embodiment and the Pursuit of Holiness in Late Ancient Christianity. Edited by Georgia Frank, Susan R. Holman, and Andrew S. Jacobs. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. xi + 384 pp. $65.00 hardcover.

Reflecting Inwardly in Order to Act Outwardly

Gilmore, Leigh, and Elizabeth Marshall. 2019. Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing. New York: Fordham University Press.

Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese. By Thomas J. Shelley. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. x + 150 pp. $29.95 hardcover – Erratum

Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese. By Thomas J. Shelley. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. x + 150 pp. $29.95 hardcover – Erratum

Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture. Edited by William Callison and Zachary Manfredi. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. 320p. $35.00 paper.

Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture. Edited by William Callison and Zachary Manfredi. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. 320p. $35.00 paper.

Veena Das: Textures of the Ordinary. Doing Anthropology After Wittgenstein. New York, NY: Fordham University Press 2020. 432 pages, $35.00 (Paperback), ISBN 978-0-8232-8769-7

Article Veena Das: Textures of the Ordinary. Doing Anthropology After Wittgenstein. New York, NY: Fordham University Press 2020. 432 pages, $35.00 (Paperback), ISBN 978-0-8232-8769-7 was published on February 3, 2021 in the journal Wittgenstein-Studien (volume 12, issue 1).

The Second Shift as Epistemological Bonus

Research Article| January 11 2021 The Second Shift as Epistemological Bonus Devika Chawla Devika Chawla Devika Chawla is a professor in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University. She teaches and writes on matters of migration, affect, material culture, and family life. She has published multiple essays and books including Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of India’s Partition (Fordham University Press, 2014). She is the editor-in-chief of the University of California Press journal Departures in Critical Qualitative Research. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Autoethnography (2021) 2 (1): 128–135. https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2021.2.1.128 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Devika Chawla; The Second Shift as Epistemological Bonus. Journal of Autoethnography 11 January 2021; 2 (1): 128–135. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2021.2.1.128 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Autoethnography Search In 2004, when I first entered the ranks of tenure-track faculty, I knew there were three tasks that I was expected to perform as a central part of my job: teaching, research, and service. To be clear, this is the expectation of work from tenure-track faculty—only the percentage of time spent on each area differs across institutions. Since I was hired into a PhD granting program, I was fully aware that publishing was critical to my tenure and promotion. As many of us do, I began the process of translating my dissertation work into essays and articles with the penultimate goal of returning to my field and conducting more fieldwork for a book (that I did not write). My dissertation explored, via life history interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, the identity experiences of women in urban Hindu arranged marriages. My publishing goal was to parcel it out in articles to various... You do not currently have access to this content.

Diversity Work as Second Shift

Research Article| January 11 2021 Diversity Work as Second Shift Devika Chawla Devika Chawla Devika Chawla is a professor in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University. She teaches and writes on matters of migration, affect, material culture, and family life. She has published multiple essays and books, including Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of India’s Partition (Fordham University Press, 2014). She is the editor-in-chief of the University of California Press journal, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Autoethnography (2021) 2 (1): 103–105. https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2021.2.1.103 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Devika Chawla; Diversity Work as Second Shift. Journal of Autoethnography 11 January 2021; 2 (1): 103–105. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2021.2.1.103 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Autoethnography Search If you follow intellectual trends in popular and academic Western feminism(s) about the labor that women perform in the home, then the phrase the second shift is almost pro forma. It was popularized and entered general parlance after the 1989 book by the same name published by Arlie Hochschild1 whose rigorous interview study with fifty married couples led her to coin this phrase. The second shift stands for the unaccounted and unpaid labor that women perform in the home after a day’s work in the formal workforce. The study came out in the period between first- and second-wave feminism in the United States. In brief, first-wave feminism was about securing the right of women to vote; it was succeeded by the economically oriented second wave, followed by the culturally oriented third wave. Hochschild’s study sits comfortably within second-wave feminism, which waned in the 1980s. If you are reading this... You do not currently have access to this content.

Colonizing Christianity: Greek and Latin Religious Identity in the Era of the Fourth Crusade by George E. Demacopoulos

Reviewed by: Colonizing Christianity: Greek and Latin Religious Identity in the Era of the Fourth Crusade by George E. Demacopoulos Mateusz J. Ferens George E. Demacopoulos, Colonizing Christianity: Greek and Latin Religious Identity in the Era of the Fourth Crusade (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 184 pp. George Demacopoulos positions his book as a sort of extended thought experiment in which he applies postcolonial critique to several literary sources written in the wake of the Latin occupation of Constantinople in 1204. While this thought experiment is certainly no tour de force of postcolonial study of the Byzantine world, it provides its readers with a serious foray into the issue of colonialism that will inevitably shape the next stage of discourse in the field. As such, the book functions as a kind of bridge inviting medievalists to engage in postcolonial critique and inviting scholars in the field of postcolonial studies to further investigate the curious case of European colonization of an indigenous Christian population. Colonizing Christianity supports two parallel theses and addresses two distinct audiences. First, it sets out to affirm the increasingly popular claim that European colonialism originated with the establishment of crusader states in the Near East. Demacopoulos is thus contributing to the field of postcolonial studies by bringing attention to the overlooked case of the European colonial enterprise in Greek territories. The thesis is certainly not original, but medievalists will take notice of the epistemic shift that Demacopoulos proposes in his reappraisal of selected texts. The book's second thesis may catch some scholars off guard because it addresses the modern-day Christian audience concerned with the possibility of ecclesial union between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Demacopoulos [End Page 248] argues that the long-standing religious polemic between Catholics and Orthodox Christians attained a new postcolonial modality in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade. This modality was characterized by political and cultural alienation and a lack of theological development. In the final pages of the book, the author encourages his Christian readers with high hopes for Catholic–Orthodox unity on the basis that the historical source of alienation was primarily political, economic, and cultural and that "there was nothing theologically insurmountable about East/West theological difference" (130). In other words, Demacopoulos contributes to today's pro-union efforts of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches by suspending the significance of theological and dogmatic incommensurability. This second thesis should not be disregarded by readers as merely an addendum to the book or a speculative attempt at connecting medieval history to the contemporary moment. On the contrary, it sustains the author's larger objective articulated in his previous publications (George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds., "Orthodox Naming of the Other: A Postcolonial Approach," in Orthodox Constructions of the West [New York: Fordham University Press, 2013], 1–22, and George Demacopoulos, "'Traditional Orthodoxy' as a Postcolonial Movement," The Journal of Religion 97, no. 4 [2017]: 475–99). Indeed, Colonizing Christianity should be read as an extension of the 2017 article in which Demacopoulos attempts to discredit the theological claims of Orthodox "traditionalism" by positing it as a postcolonial, cultural reaction against the Western "other." The author cites both of these previous publications at key moments in his book, strongly suggesting that the true impetus behind Colonizing Christianity lies in the meta-thesis spanning all three publications. The metathesis is predominantly concerned with the contemporary ecclesiological polemic over Christian unity, and the author should be commended for disclosing his pro-union inclinations so openly. That said, the dual trajectory in this book weakens its analytical rigor. The author's argument that the events of 1204 shifted religious thinking away from theological development is based on the weak logic that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Demacopoulos is considering a very small sample of works from the literati sphere and uses this selection to stand for perspectives at all levels of society. At multiple points in his analysis, he insists that the authors in the selected case studies are not concerned with issues of theology and dogma. Demacopoulos ignores the overwhelming number of scholars and writers during this "postcolonial" period who contributed crucial expositions on these matters, including such eminent figures...

Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North ed. by Robert M. Sandow

Reviewed by: Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North ed. by Robert M. Sandow Asaf Almog Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North. Edited by Robert M. Sandow. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8232-7975-3. 310 pp., cloth, $65.00. What did loyalty to the nation mean for Northerners during the American Civil War? Edited by Robert Sandow, Contested Loyalty joins recent attempts to complicate analyses of wartime nationalism. Scholars have traditionally focused on questions of loyalty in the Confederate side. The tendency emanates from the "Appomattox Syndrome," described in Gary Gallagher's phrasing in the volume's preface (x). In other words, the losing side, containing the losing narrative, was seen as the side whose willingness to fight needed an explanation. However, in recent years increasingly more studies have probed into the construction of modern nationalism in the North as well. The volume's ten essays follow this literature by examining contests over the meaning of national loyalty in various geographic, social, and ethnic contexts. [End Page 152] Melinda Lawson's opening essay looks at the place the moral duty of loyalty played in the thought of three men: abolitionist Wendell Phillips, Radical Free Soiler (and later Republican) George Julian of Indiana, and Abraham Lincoln. The nontrivial decision to place men such as Phillips and Lincoln together to begin with is the essay's most intriguing aspect. Phillips had called for disunion, immediate abolition, and racial amalgamation for several decades. Conversely, Lincoln never publicly wavered from complete fidelity to the Union. His views on race and slavery also appear vastly different from Phillips's. Lawson's explanation for her initial choice is that all three believed that the American Revolution's egalitarian principles negated slavery, and all three faced the dilemma of the justification of war to preserve these ideals. While Phillips consciously used agitation as a political means to save the Republic, only war convinced Julian to accept general emancipation as synonymous with the goal of the Union's preservation. Most problematically, Lawson states that "there were limits to Lincoln's embracement of the Union" (39). She demonstrates these limits by pointing to Lincoln's firm opposition to slavery's expansion, shown in his stance on the Kansas-Nebraska Act and subsequent politics. However, limits imply a willingness to question the Union rather than simply present an opinion about its proper course. Is there evidence of such questioning by Lincoln? In Lawson's usage of the term, Daniel Webster could be regarded as an antislavery politician whose embracement to the Union had limits. The volume's other essays move away from the national prism, and several of them demonstrate the degree to which the administration and its representatives identified loyalty exclusively with support for the war's aim of restoring the Union and punishing the rebels. Matthew Warshauer's essay discusses the ideology of Peace Democrats in wartime Connecticut. According to Warshauer, the movement reflected the perseverance of a "deeply held party ideology, a Jeffersonian conservatism" that persisted throughout the Union, across temporal and geographical boundaries (57). The movement, Warshauer argues, defies a monolithic portrayal of war opponents as residents of the Lower North. Indeed, the party's Connecticut chapter remained competitive throughout the antebellum years and during the war itself. Warshauer identifies two main principles of Copperhead ideology: first, Peace Democrats opposed the war qua war, because of its damage to life and economy. In addition, they emphasized the constitutional principles at stake: the sovereignty of the Southern states, including that over their slaves, explicitly guaranteed by the Founders. Republican action and rhetoric, Peace Democrats argued, enhanced the risk of Federal despotism. Copperhead ideology persuaded many in Connecticut, whose electoral votes Lincoln carried by a narrow margin in 1864. More importantly, Warshauer states, Democrats throughout the Union had a lasting influence: [End Page 153] "Historians can ultimately judge the Democrats wrong in their views on race and humanity, but their views on constitutional authority and states' rights versus a powerful federal government have continued to rage in American society" (73). Warshauer emphasizes that Peace Democrats were ultimately loyal to the Union, despite continued charges of treason...

The Forgotten Radical Peter Maurin: Easy Essays from the Catholic Worker ed. by Lincoln Rice

Reviewed by: The Forgotten Radical Peter Maurin: Easy Essays from the Catholic Worker ed. by Lincoln Rice William J. Collinge The Forgotten Radical Peter Maurin: Easy Essays from the Catholic Worker. Edited by Lincoln Rice. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. 864 pp. $34.95. This past summer, David Brooks, dissatisfied with the socially atomizing effects of liberalism and the overemphasis on group identity in today’s politics, called in the The New York Times for a revival of personalism, which stresses individual dignity and responsibility but holds that persons flourish only in community. Lincoln Rice, a member of the Milwaukee Catholic Worker who teaches theology at Marquette University, has now advanced such a revival with the first complete edition of the writings of Peter Maurin (1877–1949), the man most responsible for introducing French personalism into the United States. Rice calls Maurin the “forgotten radical.” He is not really forgotten, but his life and thought are nearly always presented as a component of a story in which Dorothy Day is the central character. Day credited him with co-founding the Catholic Worker movement, and without Day, Maurin’s thought would indeed have been forgotten. On the other hand, without Maurin there would have been no Catholic Worker, and Day would be forgotten or remembered for something else. Maurin wrote “Easy Essays” (a name suggested by Day’s brother John). An essay, usually half a page to a page long in Rice’s volume, consists of “stanzas,” each composed of a sentence divided into units of sense, arranged on the page like lines of poetry. They are not poems, but Maurin uses some poetic devices, such as repetition, wordplay, and occasionally something like rhyme. A famous stanza, encapsulating a core idea of Maurin, is: [End Page 79] The world would bebetter off if people triedto become better. Essays were published together in “arrangements,” grouped by theme. Individuating the essays would tax even the talents of John Duns Scotus, but Rice has done as well as anyone could do. Maurin often reshuffled essays into different arrangements, with small and large verbal changes, inserting and deleting stanzas, moving stanzas from one essay to another. After a very helpful introduction, Rice devotes the main part of the book to reproducing in chronological order all the essays Maurin published in the Catholic Worker newspaper from its founding in 1933 until he stopped writing in 1942 (plus one from 1945). Rice carefully notes each time, and with what variations, if any, an essay was published. He identifies 482 distinct essays and also includes the few of Maurin’s writings in the Worker that were not classified as Easy Essays. The second main section of Rice’s book comprises of eighty-seven essays not published in Maurin’s lifetime. Some were published in the Worker or elsewhere after Maurin’s death, but most are published for the first time, retrieved from the Catholic Worker archives at Marquette with the help of indefatigable archivist Phil Runkel. Appendices reproduce several interviews with Maurin published in the Worker, and a list of books recommended by Maurin. A “Biographical Glossary” identifies all persons mentioned in Maurin’s essays, from Shakespeare to the most obscure (Suzanne Michel?), and often comments on (and occasionally corrects) Maurin’s use of their work. The book concludes with detailed indexes of essays and of names and themes. Maurin calls himself a personalist, often cites Emmanuel Mounier and the Esprit school favorably, and instigated the first translation of Mounier’s work in the United States (he shows no awareness of other schools of personalism, including the American school associated with Borden Parker Bowne). He was, however, more of an eclectic thinker than a disciple of Mounier or anyone else. Influences include the social encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, the Distributism of Gilbert K. Chesterton and others, the anarchism of Peter Kropotkin, and a romanticized medievalism typical of many Catholic thinkers of his time. He opposed the New Deal and can seem like a libertarian in his disparagement of government solutions to social problems. Yet he rejected the “rugged individualism” of American libertarianism, contrasting it with a “gentle personalism,” which emphasized community...

Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality by Genevieve Yue

Reviewed by: Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality by Genevieve Yue Alix Beeston (bio) Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality by Genevieve Yue. Fordham University Press. 2020. 240 pages. $110.00 hardcover; $32.00 paper; also available in e-book. By the time I reached the midpoint of Genevieve Yue's ambitious and original first book, Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, I'd begun making a list of all the rolled heads. There was Mary Stuart's, tumbling off the executioner's block in Edison Studios' The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895); there were numerous heads of the Medusa, her severed neck impossibly smooth in Antonio Canova's nineteenth-century statue but a gory trail of tendons and blood in Benvenuto Cellini's sixteenth-century one. Lined up neatly on the page of my notebook, with bullet points like a row of spikes, these heads are significant for what they stand in for or exclude, namely, the women's bodies, chopped off and whisked away. In Edison's film, in fact, the Queen of Scots loses her body several times over. She's played by a male actor in a wig and a dress, whose substituting body is itself substituted by a dummy before the blade falls; even in the footage spliced out in service of this stop-motion illusion—some fourteen feet of film, as Yue notes—Mary's body is nowhere to be found.1 In Girl Head, Yue piles up women's heads as, she argues, film does. Just as Medusa's head becomes the gorgoneion, her face petrified by the reflection of Perseus's shield, so, too, does film transform the matter of the body, specifically the female body, into an image cut from life. Separating head [End Page 193] from body or face from flesh, this "conceptual decapitation," as Yue writes in the introduction, involves a willful forgetting of the materiality of film and its production processes.2 The material substrata of film—whether analog or digital—and the embodied labor of the film set, laboratory, editing suite, and archive are excised in its projection as a "virtual image," an image that "conjures an absent presence by resembling it in another form."3 But the physical matter, bodily or otherwise, that conditions film in its virtuality is also concealed within it, like a corpse stuffed in a trunk. In classic feminist accounts of narrative cinema, such as Mary Ann Doane's 1982 essay "Film and the Masquerade," the absence of the objects that appear on the screen interact with film's "illusory sensory plenitude" to produce the "absolute and irrecoverable distance" necessary for a fetishistic gaze.4 In this view, cinema duplicates the measure of separation essential to the actions of the voyeur, actions that must always leave open the possibility of disavowal: I wasn't looking at you or It wasn't me looking at you. Yue's critical move is to turn away from issues of representation and the structure of the gaze—to leave the voyeurs where they are, fiddling alone in half-grown bushes—and instead to interpret film's absent-present bodies as figures for the gendered logic of film materiality itself. Feminist scholars have generally assumed the neutrality of film's technical procedures and practices, but Yue maintains that these procedures—and the concepts of materiality that undergird them—have been "understood and manipulated according to social attitudes about gender."5 Inseparable from the cultural sphere that produces it, film's materiality, she argues, "is itself gendered, meaning that it is inscribed with the character and associations of women at all levels of a film's construction."6 Yue argues that film production chops off heads and hides the bodies of its victims, women whose flesh is associated with the material of the filmstrip and is necessary to, but occluded in, the expression of film as virtual image. Across three key sites, which she examines in virtuosic technical detail and with deep theoretical insight, Yue tracks how film production is predicated on female bodies "as something to be utilized as functional material and also concealed as unwanted remainder."7 In the film laboratory—the location of...

Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers

Reviewed by: Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers Evan C. Rothera Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s. Edited by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Pp. 228. Notes, index.) Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers have assembled a collection of essays that analyze North American state-making in the 1860s by employing a continental perspective "that seeks to look across and beyond the traditional nation-centered approach to this period" (1). As Towers helpfully explains, people typically associate sovereignty with government power and define it as "a right to decide and therefore to rule" (2). However, some scholars have cautioned against ascribing tidy definitions to the term. Moreover, many definitions of sovereignty have roots in the nineteenth century. Thus, this volume is as much about multifarious understandings of sovereignty as about how people contested and remade sovereignty and the relationships between nations and empires. Part I, "Making Nations," contains chapters by Steven Hahn, Andrew Smith, Pablo Mijongos y González, and Robert Bonner. Hahn analyzes the United States from the "inside out" and the "southside north" to illustrate "connections that have long been difficult to conceive" (32). Smith argues that ideas about racial and ethnic hierarchies played a critical role in the creation of the Canadian Confederation. Mexico and the United States experienced constitutional revolution, Mijongos y González observes, whereas Canada followed a path of constitutional gradualism, but despite the divergent paths, all three nations arrived at a similar endpoint. Bonner notes the importance of images to sovereignty and examines how mass-circulated images "distilled and shaped popular engagement with capital cities" (80). Part II, "Indigenous Polities," features chapters by Jane Dinwoodie, Ryan Hall, and Marcela Terrazas y Basante. Dinwoodie focuses on Eastern Cherokees and Bayou Lacombe Choctaws to reveal how Indigenous communities in the U.S. Southeast "fought to sustain a world of contested and [End Page 351] persistent sovereignties" (122). Hall analyzes treaty-making between the Blackfoot and U.S. and Canadian authorities. Blackfoot leaders attempted to make treaties that preserved their own sovereignty as they faced similar expansionist states on both sides of the border. Terrazas y Basante observes that Mexicans, U.S. settlers, and Indigenous people understood sovereignty, territory, and free transit in different ways and illustrates how Mexicans saw Indian raids as a threat to the nation's sovereignty. Part III, "The Complications of the Market," includes chapters by Christopher Clark, Benjamin H. Johnson, and Mary P. Ryan. Clark explores the relationship between ideas about the role of land and sovereignty and illustrates how farm populations shaped state power and market forces. Johnson focuses on Louis Riel and Juan Cortina to narrate national histories from border areas. Defeat in the Cortina War and the North-West Rebellion replaced "longstanding aspirations for autonomy and self-determination" among ethnic Mexicans and Métis with "violent incorporation into national communities" (215). Ryan concludes by analyzing San Francisco, California, to demonstrate how cities were key political players. Anyone interested in Texas and the Southwest will particularly enjoy Terrazas y Basante and Johnson's chapters. In many respects, Remaking North American Sovereignty is truly a transnational volume. The chapters began as conference papers at a conference held in Canada. The resulting volume features contributions by scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Mexico that focus on Mexico, the United States, and Canada. However, the definition of North America in this volume—encompassing the three aforementioned nations—is too narrow. Weaving the nations of the Caribbean and Central America into this volume would have allowed the contributors to say even more about sovereignty and nation-states. This point aside, the contributors illustrate the richness of their topics and provide models for other scholars interested in exploring sovereignty and nation-states in the nineteenth-century world. These lively essays will appeal to a general as much as a scholarly audience and many would make excellent additions to graduate seminars. Evan C. Rothera The University of Texas at Dallas Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association

Humbug! The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City’s Penny Press by Wendy Jean Katz

Reviewed by: Humbug! The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City’s Penny Press by Wendy Jean Katz Rachel N. Klein (bio) Keywords Art criticism, Penny press, Antebellum American art Humbug! The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City’s Penny Press. By Wendy Jean Katz. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Pp. 316. Paper, $35.00.) In this important study the art historian, Wendy Jean Katz, offers a fresh perspective on New York’s antebellum art scene by focusing attention on the hundreds of cheap penny newspapers that flooded the city from the 1830s to the Civil War. As it turns out, these papers gave a great deal of attention to art, and their coverage transformed artists, artworks, and art institutions into objects of fiery contestation. Other scholars have culled from this extensive body of criticism, but Katz is the first to study it systematically. She identifies the political leanings of editors, writers, and artists, showing that the penny papers generally adopted an anti-monopoly, anti-elitist stance. But she is also finely attuned to differences among the papers on issues ranging from abolitionism to socialism, nativism, expansionism, women’s rights and, above all, party politics. Insofar as the penny papers sparred with the more expensive six-penny or [End Page 699] subscription press, Katz extends her discussion to some of those publications. By effectively mapping New York City’s papers along multiple, changing axes, Katz makes a powerful case for the symbiotic relationship between political orientation and aesthetic values. The Herald and its editor, James Gordon Bennett, figure prominently in Katz’s analysis. Officially unaffiliated with any political party, this widely circulated newspaper cast itself as the people’s vanguard, challenging privilege in many guises. Bennett, a ferociously racist southern sympathizer, seemed to take pleasure in unveiling the supposedly sordid underbelly of bourgeois life. Because art and art institutions had longstanding elite connotations, they became relatively easy targets. In the realm of art, the Herald, along with other penny papers, celebrated outsiders while attacking artists whose work garnered praise from the six-penny press and high prices from wealthy collectors. The Herald scorned New York’s National Academy of Design and generally rejected the sort of genteel, romantic pictures associated with the work of prominent academicians. In turn, it embraced artworks that seemed to embody a more naturalistic, sensual aesthetic. Along with other penny papers it ridiculed the trade in European old master paintings and criticized contemporary artists deemed overly tied to European academic traditions. Katz shows that the cheap papers were often at odds when it came to individual artists and artworks, but she suggests that their rhetorical style and aesthetic values helped to drive the broader discourse of antebellum art criticism. By excavating long forgotten aesthetic disputes Katz gives due importance to marginalized, unknown figures. In the process, she opens a new window on the downfall of the American Art-Union—New York’s leading art institution of the 1840s. The Art-Union’s management included many of the city’s leading merchants. It purchased and exhibited artworks from American painters and distributed them, by lottery, to thousands of subscribers across the nation. Along with James Gordon Bennett, an artist named Thomas Whitley was among the organization’s most vociferous antagonists. Katz is the first recent scholar to take Whitley’s criticism seriously. She points out that he was affiliated with the utopian, socialist Fourierist movement, and she traces his writing though several penny papers. Generally dismissed as a vengeful, disappointed, failed artist, Whitley emerges from Katz’s research as a serious, if hyperbolic, critic who sought a more equitable system for the sale of art and support of artists. With the rise of the Republican Party came a reorientation in the politics of art criticism. Katz charts the emergence of a new generation of critics [End Page 700] who published not only in Republican papers (notably the Tribune and the Times) but also in new, specialized journals such as the Crayon and the Independent. Unlike earlier writers on art-related matters, they saw themselves as professionals. Along with the Young America writers of the 1840s, they identified with the cause of national artistic...

John Freccero (1931–2021)

John Freccero (1931–2021) Danielle Callegari John Freccero, Professor Emeritus of Italian and Comparative Literature at New York University, died on November 22, 2021 in Santa Cruz, California in the company of his family. He was ninety years old. He was predeceased by his wife Diane; he is survived by his first wife Yvonne, his children Carla, Stephen, Francesca, and Paola, and his grandchildren Isabella, Daniela, and Elijah. He is remembered as one of the greatest Dante scholars of his or any generation and a brilliant, inspiring teacher. His many publications and accolades hardly manage to capture the sweeping influence he had on the academic world and especially on his students, many of whom went on to become beloved teachers and prominent scholars themselves. Freccero was born on July 25, 1931 in New York City. His upbringing in an Italian-American family in Manhattan shaped him deeply even as he followed a trajectory very different from that of his immigrant parents, eventually receiving an academic scholarship to attend Johns Hopkins University, where he completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees. After pausing to serve in the military, he went on to pursue a Ph.D. from the same institution supported by the G.I. bill, and completed his dissertation in 1958 guided by the renowned Dantista Charles Singleton. His graduate and postdoctoral studies in Florence put him into contact with the important schools of philological and literary thought in the Italian and especially Florentine context, establishing his relationship with that city and the poet it had exiled. He recalled escaping to the hills of Florence during the flood of 1966 with his family in tow, and became a recognizable feature of Piazza Santo Spirito when he later regularly led the graduate program at New York University’s seat in Florence. [End Page 217] His first major essay, “Dante's Firm Foot and the Journey without a Guide” (The Harvard Theological Review, 1959), unraveled a long-contested crux in Dante studies and anchored Freccero as a dominant new voice in the field. It was later incorporated with his other contributions on Dante into a monograph edited by his student Rachel Jacoff, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, published by Harvard in 1986. Emphasizing the Augustinian framework that undergirds the Commedia and introducing theoretical constructs that had rarely if ever been applied to the poet, The Poetics of Conversion became essential reading not only for all students of Dante but also for any student of critical literary studies. Freccero had an uncanny ability to comment on large-scale phenomena through close reading, a talent that also came through in his work on subjects other than Dante. That his essays on John Donne, Italo Svevo, and Michelangelo Antonioni remain points of reference for students of those authors marks him as a rare example of a scholar whose work might be better defined as a practice unto itself rather than an exercise of a given methodology. In addition to his critically acclaimed Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, his published works include the edited anthology Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, 1965), and a second collection of essays, In Dante’s Wake: Reading from Medieval to Modern in the Augustinian Tradition (Fordham University Press, 2015), co-edited by Danielle Callegari and Melissa Swain. He composed the introductions for a number of notable American translations of Dante’s work, among them John Ciardi’s 1970 translation of Dante’s Paradiso and US poet laureate Robert Pinsky’s 1994 popular translation of Inferno. These publications are a reflection of how active he was in the field, as are the numerous awards and honors he received, beginning with two Fulbright fellowships for postdoctoral work, followed by a Guggenheim fellowship. The Dante Society of America bestowed him with a lifetime achievement award, and in 2015 he was among the elite group of scholars elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in the category of Humanities and the Arts. Importantly, his awards reflect his far-reaching influence, not only in the US but also in Italy, where he was honored with the Fiorino d’Oro from the city of Florence and the Premio Presidente della Repubblica for...

Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England by Jordan Kirk

Reviewed by: Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England by Jordan Kirk Paul Megna Jordan Kirk. Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. 187. $105.00 cloth; $30.00 paper; $29.99 e-book. Evidence of Jordan Kirk’s love of words is apparent everywhere in his engaging and enjoyable book, Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England. Readers would do well to keep on hand a notepad in which to jot down words such as recrudescence (n., a revival or rediscovery), sermocinal (adj., relating to speech), or tregetry (n., juggling, deception, trickery). However wonderful, these words are not the most interesting Kirk has to offer. That title must be given to a subset of words—including blottybus, blityri, coax, cra, garalus, hereceddy, kuboa, and skindapsos (to name a few)—that do not mean anything, at least not in any obvious way. Medieval Nonsense is about these words. More specifically, it is about how the inhabitants of fourteenth-century England inherited and developed the concept of non-signifying language, and how they brought it to bear [End Page 307] on their scholarly, ascetic, and aesthetic endeavors. It illustrates how far flung throughout late medieval England was interest in minute nuances, aporias, and argumentative cruces in the philosophy of language. Kirk, however, is quite adamant that he is not marshaling his texts to be illustrative. “The texts examined here,” he writes in his prolegomena, “have been selected not as expressions, symptoms, exhibits, evidence, or artifacts of some posited phenomenon, but rather insofar as they offer themselves as textual apparatuses that might still allow for thought, or indeed the suspension of thought, to arise in the moment of their being read” (20). Throughout Medieval Nonsense, Kirk remains true to this admirable approach to his textual objects. The results are consistently illuminating and occasionally dazzling. The book begins with a masterful reading of a brief passage in Chaucer’s House of Fame, in which “Colle tregetour” somehow fits a windmill underneath a walnut shell. Kirk initially establishes this moment as an allegory of signification and convincingly argues that Chaucer—surely aware of the common metaphor according to which a text is a nut whose shell (the mere letter) must be cracked to reveal the “meat” of meaning—intended it as such. Many critics would find this argument satisfying enough, but this is only the beginning of Kirk’s magic trick. He proceeds to lay down an increasingly speculative line of interpretation, positing, first, that operational windmills with grinding millstones are noisy; next, that the racket pervading the House of Fame is precisely that produced by the grinding of Colle’s millstone; and, further, that the mill (insofar as it grinds grains) constitutes “an apparatus to pulverize signification” (7). (While I won’t dwell on the possibility that wind circulates in Colle’s walnut shell, Kirk does.) Just as Colle elicits wonder by fitting a windmill under a walnut shell, Kirk amazes us by transforming an allegory of signification into one of the non-signifying word. As it progresses, the chances of Kirk’s reading’s mapping onto Chaucer’s intentions all but vanish, but this ought not hinder our appreciation of Kirk’s critical tregetry, which, after all, seeks not to diagnose texts, but to employ them as engines for provoking (or suspending) thought. The remainder of Kirk’s introduction includes a foray into modernist Europe, featuring an anecdote in which Walter Benjamin induces a hashish trance in order to coin new words (only coming up with Haupelzwerg, a mysterious species of dwarf). Kirk turns to modernism to dismantle gradually the stereotype that modernity is “the epoch of nonsense.” He does so by surveying how modernist purveyors of nonsense language and [End Page 308] philosophy shared a common interest in the Middle Ages. He then turns to Anselm of Canterbury (“the first scholastic”) and William IX, duke of Aquitaine (“the first troubadour”), to establish a foundational engagement with non-signifying language at the roots of the fourteenth-century English culture on which his study focuses. In Kirk’s long-view of meta-linguistic history, a fascination with non-signifying language is...

Womanpriest: Tradition and Transgression in the Contemporary Roman Catholic Church by Jill Peterfeso

Reviewed by: Womanpriest: Tradition and Transgression in the Contemporary Roman Catholic Church by Jill Peterfeso Marian Ronan Womanpriest: Tradition and Transgression in the Contemporary Roman Catholic Church. By Jill Peterfeso. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2020. 272 pp. $30.00. As I plunged into Jill Peterfeso’s Womanpriest, I quickly recalled Mary Fainsod Katzenstein’s 1998 analysis of feminist protest inside the Catholic Church and the U.S. military, Faithful and Fearless. For Katzenstein, feminist protest in the Catholic Church had until then used a form of “discursive radicalism,”—through publications, newspaper ads, and conferences rather than outright “protest activities”—to challenge the institutional church’s position on women. Faithful and Fearless was, however, published four years before the first ordination of Roman Catholic womanpriests on the Danube in 2002 and multiple such ordinations since then. And as Peterfeso argues, these developments expand considerably Katzenstein’s framework; Catholic feminist protest is now inside and outside the institution, in “transgression” as well as “tradition.” Peterfeso uses an expanded ethnographic method, involving interviews, observation, and data collection, but also some of her own experiences in womanpriest communities and how this has influenced [End Page 87] her Catholic identity. She draws on this research to identify actions and language showing the impact of womanpriests on contemporary Roman Catholicism. Chapter 1 details the ways in which womanpriests use the deeply personal narrative of “calling.” Focusing on the central experience of “being called,” such narratives enable these womanpriests to dispute Rome’s claim that they are nothing but activist agitators. Rather, they are faithful Catholics who, in order to obey God’s call, must disobey a patriarchal institution. Chapter 2 argues that the retention of “Roman Catholic” in the group’s title demonstrates a commitment to Roman Catholic identity. It also explores ways in which Roman Catholicism since Vatican II has sent out mixed messages, bringing the word “conscience” into the Catholic vernacular even as it refuses women who feel called to priesthood the right to follow their consciences. These methods combine “conflict and creativity” (chapter 3). In response to the decline of a male-priest-centered western Roman Catholicism, womanpriests create “discipleships of equals” that enable members to express their Catholicism more fully. But such creativity also generates conflict, as when the Association of Roman Catholic Womanpriests split from the original Roman Catholic Womanpriests in 2010 over how to structure leadership without authoritarianism. Womanpriest ordinations (chapter 4) are a prime instance of such creativity and conflict, eliciting not only Vatican condemnation and excommunication as “contra legem,” but also feminist critique for their ostensible reinforcement of “subordination.” Yet such ordinations also bring much-needed public attention to the issue of women’s subordination in the church. The emphasis on the centrality of the community in the celebration of the sacraments is another of the transformative effects of womanpriest leadership (chapter 5). But this, too, elicits creativity and conflict, with some participants seeing the ontological nature of the [End Page 88] sacraments and apostolic succession as more important than community participation. Chapter 6 then examines how womanpriests’ situation as unsalaried “worker priests” facilitates their involvement with other groups and group leaders, while Chapter 7 explores how the actual bodies of womanpriests have the potential to reposition the gendered, sexual, and sacred natures of the priesthood. Finally, in the conclusion, Peterfeso extends earlier reflections about her involvement in a womanpriest congregation in St. Louis, Therese of Divine Peace Inclusive Roman Catholic Community. Initially she was unable to decide what to make of the liturgies there—did they remind her of the thousands of Catholic liturgies throughout her life or deviate too much from them? Peterfeso’s initial concerns—about the absence of kneelers, for example, and the “enthusiastic affection” throughout womanpriest liturgies—receded, however, as she came to appreciate engaging more directly with others, in shared homilies and other liturgical interactions. Her experience also intensified her discomfort with the church’s history of treating women as less holy than men. In the conclusion, Peterfeso raises certain critical questions about the future of the womanpriest movement, the small numbers and increasing age of its membership, and the negative attitudes toward women’s ordination in the Global South...

The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary by Jason Groves

Reviewed by: The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary by Jason Groves Jason Ciaccio The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary. By Jason Groves. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Pp. 173. Paper $30.00. ISBN 978-0823288090. How has the mineral world informed the literary imagination? Jason Groves's new book addresses this question through an analysis of literary texts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-language authors. His project is "driven by an inquiry into the literary forms of geological intimacy … in and around German romanticism" (12); one might also call it a reading of wandering rocks in literature, as Groves highlights the motions and instabilities of stones in various literary texts. His chapters are organized around interpretations of selections from Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, and Benjamin, with an introduction and epilogue that situate his study within contemporary discussions of the Anthropocene and pose questions of literature and reading in relation to stones. Groves begins his study by situating it in contemporary environmentalist discussions. He modifies the claim that the earth is no longer the stable and secure home it once was by suggesting that a feeling of the earth's volatility is nothing new, and that this volatility can be tracked through an analysis of literature. As his title suggests, he employs psychoanalytic terminology as a point of departure for his inquiry and conceptualizes his study as "an attempt to discern a latent Anthropocene in nineteenth-century German-language fiction" (3). For this task, he employs the term "erratics," an important concept in his theoretical idiom that refers to the myriad movements, slippages, and miniaturizations of the earth, all of which disrupt the conventional view of the earth as stable, solid, and ontologically grounding. These displacements and disruptions constitute the principal point of inquiry for the study; the book's theoretical ambitions, however, lie in outlining a "New Modality of Theory" (15), a modality not rooted in the anthropocentric subjectivity of psychoanalysis. Rather, Groves looks to generate a type of ecocriticism that reads with an attunement to the inorganic. The inorganic is conceptualized not simply as a [End Page 403] counterpart of life and human subjectivity, but something vastly more immense, our relation to it being radically asymmetrical. Confronting that vastness, along with the "deep time" of the earth, presents another blow to our sense of self-importance that Groves situates in line with Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud: he thus reads literature from this position of "humiliation." Groves's reading of Tieck's Der Runenberg (1804), the focus of his first chapter, is illustrative of this theoretical shift. Contrary to readings of German Romanticism that would understand the ascents and descents on Rune mountain as explorations of the interior space of the self, Groves proposes a less anthropocentric reading. He emphasizes instead the numerous ways in which the earth makes itself heard in the text—as in the uprooting of the mandrake—and reads the tale's mineral imagery as a revelation of the "inhuman." The tablet of jewels that Christian receives in an important narrative moment is interpreted as exercising its own gaze. The mine, Groves finds, is not merely a metaphor for the self, but conditions subjectivity, the technology of mining having already been present in the recesses of selfhood. Articulating this shift in perspective, Groves states, "The romantic vision of the mines involves minerals envisioning the romantics" (32). The work of Walter Benjamin figures prominently in the second half of Groves's study, particularly Benjamin's notion of shock, "Erschütterung," a term whose rich significations Groves patiently unpacks. Groves's chapter on Adalbert Stifter frames its argument as a critical response to Benjamin's claim that Stifter never registered shock in his work. Groves, instead, reads shock in Stifter's landscapes and their vibrant debris (Schutt), as well as in the narrative incongruities that Stifter's revisions produced. In his direct engagement with Benjamin, Groves emphasizes the destabilizing stone underfoot during Benjamin's various perambulations and cites as a most vivid illustration of shock a powerful short piece by Benjamin: "Downhill." Groves cites in entirety this piece that juxtaposes an image of Proust suddenly struck by grief from his grandmother...

Creations of Class: Antiquity in New York City

Creations of Class: Antiquity in New York City PETER AICHER Leafing through the American Institute of Architects’ New York City guide with an eye on classical influences, one’s attention will be arrested on almost every page by a thumbnail photograph of a classical column, cornice , pediment, or frieze, its heritage sometimes acknowledged with brief commentary: “A sliver with a meticulous Ionic-columned Roman Temple on top. Peer upward” (The Baudouine Building, Broadway and 28th ).1 Clearly more is called for. But how to select, from among the thousands of potential and hundreds of worthy examples, the individual subjects for a fuller treatment of their heritage, how to arrange them, discuss them, and weigh their significance, either singly or as parts of a larger narrative or argument? These are some of the challenges that confront Macauley-Lewis’s (M-L) archeologically informed study Antiquity in Gotham: The Ancient Architecture of New York City. The antiquity at play, M-L stresses in the introduction, is not limited to Greece and Rome but includes among the sources of inspiration the antiquities of Egypt and the Near East. These traditions form a combined category the author calls the Neo-Antique. This makes eminent sense: ancient Egypt and the Near East are also part of the dialogue carried on by antique forms in the streets, cemeteries, parlors, and parks of the city, with each ancient culture contributing some characteristic association and lending import to a building arion 29.2 fall 2021 Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis, Antiquity in Gotham: The Ancient Architecture of New York City (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2021), 280 pages with 114 b/w and color figures. 152 celebrating the invisible or monument. M-L emphasizes that these values and associations were never monolithic or stable. The contributions of a building’s ancient heritage varied according to social and political conditions that could raise or lower the stock of an ancient culture, as its characteristic values (these too variously conceived and fluctuating) shifted in response to historical circumstances and changing ideals. The challenge, then, for the author of Antiquity in Gotham becomes the integration of these historical and ideological components of the study with a structure and approach focused on the individual entries selected for comparison with their ancient sources of inspiration. More on this tension later. Foundational to the book’s approach and contribution is its arrangement. Rather than proceeding historically—from a discussion of buildings in the Greek Revival style of the early 1800’s, for instance, to those of the neo-classical Beaux Arts movement that channeled imperial Rome at the end of that century—or arranging the material topographically—this is not a guidebook, the author cautions—M-L creates nine chapters that each treat a type or genre of a building’s function . Somewhat like Vitruvius organizing his material into sections on temples, forums, theaters, private buildings, walls, aqueducts, etc., M-L groups her entries into chapters on infrastructure , civic buildings, commercial buildings, funerary monuments, commemorative structures and so forth, with some historical progression prevailing within each chapter. Classical literary scholars will be familiar with this approach from the numerous studies that arrange and consider texts by genre on the grounds that individual works of epic, lyric, drama, and satire generated meaning by carrying on a special dialogue with others of their own kind. Some of that is at play here. For instance, within the same decade, both Columbia and New York University constructed, as showpieces for their new campuses, libraries based on the Pantheon. Both buildings in turn were part of a larger dialogue channeling the prestige of the Pantheon through a previous American Peter Aicher 153 incarnation, the rotunda designed by Thomas Jefferson for the library of the University of Virginia eighty years earlier. As M-L presents the discourse among individual buildings in New York, however, or between them and the ancient buildings they drew on for inspiration and effect, the dialogue was far more impressionistic than the tight intertextual weave we labor to elucidate in ancient texts. This is New York City after all, where the dominant mode relating one building to another is more demolition than dialogue. The author’s curation...

Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair by Bonnie Honig

Reviewed by: Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair by Bonnie Honig Nica Siegel (bio) Bonnie Honig, Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair New York: Fordham University Press, 2017; 160 pp. In a telling aside in in her first book, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (1993), political theorist Bonnie Honig notes that “Arendtian action runs the risk of starting from nowhere and encountering or engaging nothing at all” (Honig 1993, 123). This is because, “Arendt sometimes seems to assume that political space has to be an empty site, situated in a stable place … rather than an unstable fissure in an otherwise highly ordered and settled practice or identity.” In Honig’s re-reading of Arendt there is no “properly political” space of action, closed off from the messiness of the private sphere, with all of the exclusions on the basis of gender, race, class, and disability that this entails. Instead, precisely because the space of action is not restricted to one domain, nor determined in advance, action’s generative power can be used to “proliferate the sites” within which action is possible. Insistence on the irrepressibility of action is one of the characteristic gestures of Honig’s “agonism”—one that posits inexhaustible forms of world-building under conditions that otherwise seem to deny its possibility, what Arendt famously called “loss of world.” In her newest book, Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (2017), Honig reflects on the status and stakes of this project today. In Public Things, a series of lectures first offered in Sydney in 2013, Honig takes up the permanent entanglement of even the most improbable forms of action with political worldliness, finding our messy, disowned, ongoing implication in remainders and [End Page 286] ruins worthy of attention, and offering a distinctive form of care for the world. Thinking anew about the capacity that Arendt granted to objects to “stabilize a world fit for human inhabitation” (34), Honig refocuses her critical attention on the worldly things themselves under conditions of contemporary “loss of world,” with an emphasis on the rampant privatization and neoliberalization of the last decades. Democracy, Honig writes, is “rooted in common love for, antipathy to, and contestation of public things” like infrastructure, libraries, prisons, museums, and monuments. Without public things, “action in concert is undone and the signs and symbols of democratic life are devitalized” (4). In this account, which draws together democratic theory and object relations theory, the world is never totally lost—it is only waiting to be “refurnished.” The purpose of Public Things is to reconsider, under conditions of neoliberalization, the form of object relations necessary for democratic politics, the specific role of public things in democratic relations, and to rethink the conditions of political action from this perspective. Neoliberalism’s drive to privatize everything has not quelled our object-attachments, although it has placed them under strain. Following recent work under the heading of “new materialism,” a sustained focus on what Honig calls “thinging out loud” offers us not just the stabilizing function of objects, but also their unexpected vitality, their ability to hold us and disrupt us, to reflect in material, historical ways the forms of our investments in them. Building on Arendt’s account of the inter-est, the political space in which we simultaneously drawn together and held apart as though gathered around a large table, the Arendt of Public Things is specifically attuned to the democratic elements of object relations, their ability to constitute a public perspective, to “hold and be held.” In this sense, democratic objects relations can be opposed to object fetishism, which rejects love for the world in favor of the love of home, the love of self, or (we might assume, although Honig doesn’t name it) the pitfalls of the love of only one’s own people (47). With an idiosyncratic materialism, Honig puts Arendt brilliantly into conversation with an unexpected interlocutor, the twentieth-century British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. As Honig writes, “The wager of these lectures is that these two thinkers’ unexpectedly convergent ideas about stability, adhesion, attachment, resilience, concern and care … can be usefully extended to think about specifically political and public things in democratic contexts” (3). The text hopes both to...

American Parishes: Remaking Local Catholicism ed. by Gary J. Adler Jr., Tricia C. Bruce and Brian Starks

Reviewed by: American Parishes: Remaking Local Catholicism ed. by Gary J. Adler Jr., Tricia C. Bruce and Brian Starks James C. Cavendish American Parishes: Remaking Local Catholicism. Edited by Gary J. Adler, Jr., Tricia C. Bruce, and Brian Starks. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. 224 pp. $30.00. American Parishes is a well-organized, thought-provoking book that calls for a renewed focus on the sociology of Catholic parishes. Until recently, the field of congregational studies, as these authors argue, has focused primarily on Protestant congregations without really recognizing the distinctive features of Catholic parishes. This book successfully brings the insights of congregational studies to bear on Catholic parish life in the United States, and in so doing, helps to establish a research agenda for scholars interested in the sociological dynamics involved in American Catholic parishes today. It is a welcome resource for sociologists of religion, college professors who wish to expand their students’ supplemental reading materials, and church practitioners who seek to familiarize themselves with the key issues and trends in Catholic parish life today. [End Page 85] Part I of the book, “Seeing Parishes Through a Sociological Lens,” summarizes the history of the sociological study of parishes in the United States and highlights the various ways that Catholic parishes are distinct from Protestant congregations, primarily in terms of size, the use of small ministry groups, the availability of clergy, clerical authority, expectations of lay leadership and participation, and congregational diversity. These differences, according to Nancy Ammerman, author of the book’s second chapter, provide the bases “where the study of parishes may genuinely plow new (conceptual) ground” (59), making parishes “fertile ground for examining local religious culture” (62). The chapters that form Part II “Parish Trends,” Part III “Race, Class, and Diversity in the Parish,” and Part IV “Young Catholics In (and Out) of Parishes,” present insights and findings stemming from the contributing authors’ own empirical research into specific aspects of American Catholic parishes. They discuss trends in American Catholics’ parish-going behavior, generational variation in attachment to parishes, and variation within and across parishes in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and region. In Mark Gray’s chapter, for instance, readers learn that although the percentage of Americans who identify as Catholics has remained fairly stable over time, there is a clear downward trend in the percentage who would be regarded as “core” Catholics (i.e., those who are highly involved in their parishes), and that that percentage is not as high is one might think. In Kathleen Graces-Foley’s chapter, we learn that many of the young adult Catholics she studied engage in parish shopping or parish hopping and rarely register at a parish. According to Graces-Foley, these young Catholics, rather than regarding a particular parish as their “home parish,” prefer instead to use parishes as hubs for their participation in various parachurch organizations, transparish social groups, and online social networks. These specific findings, which reveal a declining significance of the parish in the lives of many Catholics, particularly young Catholics, will raise questions among readers about why it is important to take a renewed focus on the sociology of Catholic parishes. Fortunately, the authors provide compelling explanations, on both empirical and theoretical grounds, for why sociologists should continue to examine Catholic parishes today. In Chapter 3, for instance, Gary Adler provides evidence of important changes taking place among Catholic parishes—members and leaders are becoming older and more Hispanic, parish cultures are becoming more theologically conservative and politicized, and participation boundaries for women and gays and lesbians are increasing. These dynamics matter because, as the authors argue, [End Page 86] Catholic parishes occupy and remain “the embedded middle of American Catholicism” (231). They are the meso-level settings in which individual Catholics come together to form community and “create a local identity within a global Catholic Church.” As the point where Catholicism from “below” meets Catholicism from “above,” parishes are an important object of study precisely because they reveal where microlevel actions do not always match macro-level pronouncements. In sum, American Parishes: Remaking Local Catholicism is an excellent new addition to the literature on American Catholicism. It presents a convincing argument for...