In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • About This Issue
  • Nicholas Rademacher, Co-editor

In this issue’s cover essay, Margaret M. McGuinness (La Salle University) commemorates the 300th anniversary of the death of St. John Baptist de la Salle by reflecting on the legacy and contemporary significance of Lasallian higher education in the United States.

Michael A. Skaggs (University of Notre Dame) presents the interlocking history of Catholics’ response to the Second Vatican Council and the Civil Rights Movement through a study of developments in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. He argues that the two must be read together. He illustrates the tension between a desire to maintain the status quo and progressive efforts to promote racial justice in both church and state.

Susan Bigelow Reynolds (Emory University) brings to our attention the implications of contemporary communion ecclesiology for racial justice in the church. She argues that the current, dominant paradigm of communion ecclesiology fails to account for diversity in twenty-first parish communities because it posits a unity that does not actually exist. As a counterpoint, drawing on the work of Jamie T. Phelps, Elizabeth A. Johnson, and M. Shawn Copeland, Reynolds offers the retrieval of a feminist and womanist communion ecclesiology that emphasizes liberation and solidarity across difference. Their vision of communion, she holds, can serve as a valuable resource in responding to the lived diversity of Catholic parish life in the United States today.

In the second installment of our ongoing “Forgotten Classics” feature, Anthony E. Clark (Whitworth University) reintroduces readers to the longstanding cultural influence and contemporary significance of John Wu’s Beyond East and West; Philip Gleason (University of Notre Dame) revisits three items with historiographical significance and invites further investigation into the way mid-century U.S. church historians understood their task; and Joseph Romano (Cabrini University) reflects on his unexpected reappraisal of Myles Connolly’s Mr. Blue some six decades removed from his initial reading of the novel.

American Catholic Studies closes its 130th volume with this issue. We are grateful to our authors, reviewers, and readers for their support of the journal this year and over the more than a century that the journal has been in print. [End Page i]

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