The Spirit’s Tether: Family, Work, and Religion Among American Catholics by Mary Ellen Konieczny (review)

Family and work constitute central spheres of human life, critical to the flourishing of persons, communities, and religious institutions. Yet, these everyday spheres tend to be relatively neglected foci for spirituality scholars, and Catholic theologies of family and work remain fairly abstract. The Spirit’s Tether opens up some new pathways here as it provides a richly textured sociological glimpse into the religious dimensions of family and work among American Catholics. In its close attention to everyday life, the social processes of moral polarization, and the connections between spirituality and parish life, the book makes a fresh and valuable contribution.

The book is the fruit of twenty months of ethnographic research in two urban Midwestern parishes; Konieczny describes one, Our Lady of Assumption, as “religiously conservative” and the other, Saint Brigitta, as “theologically progressive.” (The usefulness of those very terms increasingly is contested, as the conservative-liberal label can accentuate the very polarization Konieczny addresses. Still, these are descriptors she uses in the book.) This is not simply a book about the spirituality of family life but also about the relationship between various spiritualities of family life and an increasingly polarized public debate about the family. Konieczny, who dedicates her book to Joseph Cardinal Bernadin and expresses admiration for his “Common Ground Initiative,” seeks to understand “increasing conflict and incivility in our public politics” (234). While the “culture wars” operate at the level of “elite discourse” (234), Konieczny turns her attention to the contours of everyday life and local congregations, exploring how religion functions in cultural conflict on the local level. The central project of the book is “to present a close and detailed analysis of local religious cultures of family life” and therein “to identify when and how these cultures produce and support polarizing tendencies that emerge in cultural conflicts about the family” (5–6).

Konieczny unfolds the study through an interesting series of comparative analyses of families in the two parishes through the lenses of worship and ecclesiology; Catholic identity and belonging; marriage ideals and styles; cultures of childhood and parenting; and perceptions, practices, and norms of women’s work. She shows, for example, how the differing worship styles of the two parishes—one more traditional, reverent, and hierarchical, the other a more casual gym mass with extensive lay participation—enact different ecclesial metaphors (church as family at Our Lady of Assumption and church as community at Saint Brigitta) which then are transposed onto everyday family life. In other words, worship patterns Catholics into different, often polarized models of social/family relations. She explores how lay narratives of love and marriage at Assumption are intertwined with Church doctrine about human sexuality, and particularly the prohibition on artificial birth control. This more “institutional” model of marriage is contrasted with the operative model at Saint Brigitta’s, where the religious meaning of marriage centers more on romantic love and intimacy that grounds outward social vocations. In each parish, religion shapes the vision of marriage, though with different emphases which correspond to the central ecclesial metaphors embodied in worship. Similarly, Konieczny examines the religious dimensions of parenting ideals and practices in each parish as they play out in approaches to education, discipline, family prayer, protection, and social/cultural engagement. She also gives needed attention to how Catholic women differently navigate work-family issues, and how parish worship/ecclesial identities shape and sustain “opposed and competing visions of work and family” (189–190).

To her credit, Konieczny gives a highly textured reading of the narratives. She has chosen parishes on the extreme poles of conservative-progressive American Catholicism in order to better highlight contrasts. Still, she does not present caricatures but shows the complexities within the local narratives and notes points of similarity across the parishes. She includes ample quotations and participant notes to bring alive her research subjects, whom she treats with empathy, respect, and curiosity. Women’s voices are...