Project MUSE®: American Catholic Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in American Catholic Studies.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 122 (2011) through current issueLatest Articles: American Catholic StudiesTWOProject MUSE®American Catholic Studies2161-85342161-8542Latest articles in American Catholic Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®About This Issue
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987383
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In “Forming and Reforming National Parishes: The Archdiocese of Newark’s Confrontation with Race and Ethnicity in the 1930s,” Maggie Goldberger (University of Chicago Divinity School) uses archival material and oral histories to explore how parishioners and clergy at two churches in Montclair, New Jersey—Our Lady of Mount Carmel (an Italian national parish) and Saint Peter Claver (a Black mission church)—conceived and expressed racial and ethnic identities. Her goal is to illuminate the shifting racial politics and priorities of Newark’s ecclesiastical leadership during that era.In “Bread of Life, Diverse Realities: Understandings of the Eucharist through a Sociodemographic Lens,” sociologist Laura Upenieks (Baylor
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544/image/coversmallAbout This Issue2026-04-04text/htmlen-USAbout This Issue2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®36492026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04Forming and Reforming National Parishes: The Archdiocese of Newark’s Confrontation with Race and Ethnicity in the 1930s
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987384
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In 1939 Montclair’s tiny Fourth Ward—a small working-class neighborhood in an otherwise affluent North Jersey streetcar suburb—had the distinction of welcoming two official episcopal visits from Thomas Walsh, the Archbishop of Newark. Walsh had begun the year with a visit in January to dedicate the rebuilt Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a $185,000 project that replaced the small wooden chapel where members of the Italian national parish had been worshipping since 1907. In November of the same year, Walsh returned to the neighborhood to dedicate yet another newly constructed church, Saint Peter Claver, a “mission” of the Black Catholic “mother church” Queen of Angels in Newark. The addition of Saint Peter Claver and Our
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544/image/coversmallForming and Reforming National Parishes: The Archdiocese of Newark’s Confrontation with Race and Ethnicity in the 1930s2026-04-04text/htmlen-USForming and Reforming National Parishes: The Archdiocese of Newark’s Confrontation with Race and Ethnicity in the 1930s2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®851982026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04Bread of Life, Diverse Realities: Understandings of the Eucharist Through a Sociodemographic Lens
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987385
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In Catholic theology, the celebration of the Eucharist is the “source and summit of Christian life.”1 The doctrine of transubstantiation was adopted by the church in 1215 to denote the privileged way of speaking about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist: “The body and blood of Jesus Christ are truly contained in the Sacrament of the Altar under the outward appearances of bread and wine, the bread having been transubstantiated into the body and the wine into the blood.” Yet despite the centrality of the Eucharist to Catholic faith and worship, consistent evidence suggests that many Catholics do not possess a correct understanding of Eucharistic beliefs. Over the past decade, the Pew Research Center has
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544/image/coversmallBread of Life, Diverse Realities: Understandings of the Eucharist Through a Sociodemographic Lens2026-04-04text/htmlen-USBread of Life, Diverse Realities: Understandings of the Eucharist Through a Sociodemographic Lens2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®977362026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present by Jay P. Dolan, and: The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 by Robert Anthony Orsi (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987386
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The year was 1985. Marty McFly drove the DeLorean, Pope John Paul II convened the first World Youth Day, and George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” played on the radio. Two books arrived that together would define the next four decades of Catholic studies in the United States. The first, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present, was the work of Jay P. Dolan, a much-respected historian at the University of Notre Dame. The second, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, was by Robert Anthony Orsi. Orsi was two decades Dolan’s junior and had completed his doctorate at Yale University three years earlier.I first read these books a few months
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544/image/coversmallThe American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present by Jay P. Dolan, and: The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 by Robert Anthony Orsi (review)2026-04-04text/htmlen-USThe American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present by Jay P. Dolan, and: The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 by Robert Anthony Orsi (review)2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®283242026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade by Daniel K. Williams (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987387
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In this illuminating study of how American Christians have debated the morality, law, and politics of abortion, Daniel K. Williams challenges the prevailing academic assumption that “theological views of abortion” are “capricious and subject to sudden reversals” (xiii). Instead, Williams convincingly demonstrates that scholars must take seriously “[r]eligious beliefs and historic theological traditions” if they seek to “understand why Americans have such strong convictions on both sides of [the abortion] issue” (xiii).Abortion and America’s Churches is focused on twentieth-century debates within and among three of the United States’ most politically influential religious communities: “liberal” (or “mainline”)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544/image/coversmallAbortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade by Daniel K. Williams (review)2026-04-04text/htmlen-USAbortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade by Daniel K. Williams (review)2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®72852026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04The Correspondence of John Carroll and Charles Plowden, 1779–1816 ed. by Thomas W. Jodziewicz (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987388
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Rev. John Carroll (1735–1815), first Catholic bishop and later, archbishop of Baltimore, the premiere episcopal see in the United States (1789), is familiar even to those with only a cursory knowledge of the religious history of North America. Rev. Charles Plowden (1743–1821), his Jesuit priestly confrere and longtime colleague, collaborator, friend, and confidante, who preached at Carroll’s episcopal consecration in England, is unfortunately far less well-known today. Plowden has never been the subject of an appropriately comprehensive biographical treatment, despite his key participation in a number of major historical events: the hierarchical establishment of the Catholic Church in the early US republic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544/image/coversmallThe Correspondence of John Carroll and Charles Plowden, 1779–1816 ed. by Thomas W. Jodziewicz (review)2026-04-04text/htmlen-USThe Correspondence of John Carroll and Charles Plowden, 1779–1816 ed. by Thomas W. Jodziewicz (review)2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®74772026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s by Paul Elie (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987389
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My students have often been surprised that, in the academic study of religion, there is no singular and broadly agreed-upon definition for the central concern of the field, i.e., religion. I fear Paul Elie’s book will not help matters in this regard, and I think we’re better off for it. In The Last Supper, Elie has given us a wide-ranging, anecdote-driven work of cultural history which corrals the four titular terms into something coherent to help us make sense of a decade which is still coming into focus for our field, especially as its half-life becomes clearer in light of present events.Elie’s primary goal is to pull a broad selection of artists, cultural works, and political dustups under one roof by deploying
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544/image/coversmallThe Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s by Paul Elie (review)2026-04-04text/htmlen-USThe Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s by Paul Elie (review)2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®75272026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04The Glacier Priest: Father Bernard Hubbard and America’s Last Frontier by Josh McMullen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987390
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From 1867 onward, Americans south of Alaska crafted framings about Alaska that placed it within their understandings of the contiguous United States. The Glacier Priest by Josh McMullen is an engaging biography of a Jesuit priest who shaped mainstream American perspectives of Alaska in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. Father Bernard Hubbard (1888–1962), popularly known as the “Glacier Priest,” influenced the national narrative of Alaska through his prolific and influential outputs. Hubbard paired Alaskan expeditions with packed national lecture tours and overlapping projects in multiple mediums. In his lifetime, he lectured to millions, took more than two hundred thousand photographs, wrote three books and a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544/image/coversmallThe Glacier Priest: Father Bernard Hubbard and America’s Last Frontier by Josh McMullen (review)2026-04-04text/htmlen-USThe Glacier Priest: Father Bernard Hubbard and America’s Last Frontier by Josh McMullen (review)2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®67202026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America by Christian Smith (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987391
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Not so long ago, the thesis of secularization in the United States was declared moribund. After all, in the face of modernization, Americans exhibited persistently high levels of religious commitment through most of the twentieth century. In the past decade, however, the pendulum has swung dramatically in the other direction. Evidence of rapid religious decline in the twenty-first century has emerged, and the drop is particularly pronounced among younger generations. This has sparked several volumes in recent years seeking to make sense of what is happening with American religion and why.In Why Religion Went Obsolete, sociologist of religion Christian Smith makes his own notable contribution to this conversation.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544/image/coversmallWhy Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America by Christian Smith (review)2026-04-04text/htmlen-USWhy Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America by Christian Smith (review)2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®80732026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04Unforgivable: An Abusive Priest and the Church That Sent Him Abroad by Kevin Lewis O’Neill (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987392
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Anyone who has worked on Catholic clergy sex abuse will agree with Kevin Lewis O’Neill’s appraisal that he was “unprepared for the scale of the abuse” (xvii). While O’Neill documents familiar patterns—abuse, secrecy, personal pain, callous institutional indifference—the anthropologist brings out another element of this dark narrative. In the case of abuser Father David Roney, a Catholic diocese facilitated his movement from rural Minnesota to war-torn Guatemala. The priest had abused young children for years, and in 1987 was sent for evaluation to a church treatment center in New Mexico. Rather than pursue long-term treatment, Roney returned to Minnesota. In 1994, when he was seventy-three, the diocese then
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544/image/coversmallUnforgivable: An Abusive Priest and the Church That Sent Him Abroad by Kevin Lewis O’Neill (review)2026-04-04text/htmlen-USUnforgivable: An Abusive Priest and the Church That Sent Him Abroad by Kevin Lewis O’Neill (review)2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®64642026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04History’s Erratics: Irish Catholic Dissidents and the Transformation of American Capitalism, 1870–1930 by David M. Emmons (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987393
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By his own account, David Emmons has been “studying the history of Irish Catholics in America for more than thirty years” (10). History’s Erratics is the culmination of his wide-ranging and careful study, and it is immediately evident that Emmons believes American labor historians have taken neither the Irishness nor the Catholicism of Irish Catholics seriously enough. These distinct but overlapping identities, Emmons argues, “profoundly affected the response of IrishCatholic [sic] workers to modern American capitalism, and to the ways they would contest capitalism’s principles and power” (255).Emmons writes that Irish Catholics never fully assimilated to American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544/image/coversmallHistory’s Erratics: Irish Catholic Dissidents and the Transformation of American Capitalism, 1870–1930 by David M. Emmons (review)2026-04-04text/htmlen-USHistory’s Erratics: Irish Catholic Dissidents and the Transformation of American Capitalism, 1870–1930 by David M. Emmons (review)2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®85012026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04Beyond the Devil’s Road: Francisco Garcés and the Spanish Encounter with the American Southwest by Jeremy Beer (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987394
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Though lamented by borderlands historians, the fact remains that many—if not most—Americans remain indifferent to the truth that the tree of liberty has some roots in New Spanish soil. Deep-running as those roots are and remain, it is all too easy for many readers to isolate the Spanish North to a charitable footnote before moving onto the US West. Thus, borderland lovers must wrestle with a question—How can the numerically smaller and colonially sparser Spanish still demonstrate their significance in the American tapestry?Enter Beyond the Devil’s Road by Jeremy Beer. The book chronicles Francisco Hermenegildo Garcés, a Franciscan missionary and trail-blazer of the northern frontiers of colonial Mexico.Garcés’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544/image/coversmallBeyond the Devil’s Road: Francisco Garcés and the Spanish Encounter with the American Southwest by Jeremy Beer (review)2026-04-04text/htmlen-USBeyond the Devil’s Road: Francisco Garcés and the Spanish Encounter with the American Southwest by Jeremy Beer (review)2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®72292026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04Spiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial by Michelle M. Nickerson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987395
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Three years after the highly publicized Catonsville, Maryland, draft board raid in 1968 and subsequent acts of resistance to the Vietnam War, in 1971 twenty-eight conspirators attempted to destroy draft records in Camden, New Jersey. Numbering among small groups of radicalized Catholic activists and their allies, they comprised part of the Resistance wing of the diffuse antiwar movement, and they were commonly known as the Catholic Left or Ultra Resistance.Historian Michelle Nickerson has assumed the daunting task of illuminating the story of the Camden action by investigating the conspirators, their motivations, their attempt to impede the draft, their fatal errors, and their astonishing success in the federal
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544/image/coversmallSpiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial by Michelle M. Nickerson (review)2026-04-04text/htmlen-USSpiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial by Michelle M. Nickerson (review)2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®52112026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04Blessed Are the Activists: Catholic Advocacy, Human Rights, and Genocide in Guatemala by Michael J. Cangemi (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987396
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The colorful blouses of Mayan women are more than garments; huipiles are “woven texts” expressing story and identity. In Blessed Are the Activists, Michael J. Cangemi, assistant professor at West Point, skillfully weaves religious, historical, socio-economic, political, and cultural threads to examine how Catholic activists responded to Guatemala’s violence and human rights abuses. Set amid the country’s 1960–1996 civil war, which claimed two hundred thousand lives and displaced a million people, mostly Mayan, his study shows how faith-driven activism sought to expose injustice and influence US policy. The UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification found that most of the violence was carried out by the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544/image/coversmallBlessed Are the Activists: Catholic Advocacy, Human Rights, and Genocide in Guatemala by Michael J. Cangemi (review)2026-04-04text/htmlen-USBlessed Are the Activists: Catholic Advocacy, Human Rights, and Genocide in Guatemala by Michael J. Cangemi (review)2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®72852026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04Dissertation Abstracts
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987397
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Schill, Meghan. “Her Zealous Labor”: Catholic Sisters, the US Sanitary Commission, and the Dynamics of Hospital Personnel in the American Civil War. Case Western Reserve University. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2025. 32112053.This dissertation explores the roles of Catholic sister nurses, both during the Civil War and after, in the creation of the nursing profession. Despite playing a central role in Civil War hospitals, Catholic nurses have been almost entirely invisible in the outpouring of texts about the subject. This study seeks to correct that omission. It focuses on the dynamics between three specific categories of Civil War hospital workers—Catholic sisters, Protestant women nurses, and male doctors—and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544/image/coversmallDissertation Abstracts2026-04-04text/htmlen-USDissertation Abstracts2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®169262026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04Documenting and Replicating the Traditional Habit of the Sisters of Charity of New York
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987398
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Amid the ongoing decline in vocations to religious life among American women, the material markers of that life—habits, veils, coifs, wimples, and scapulars—are increasingly absent from public memory and scholarly record. For members of women’s religious communities, the habit was not simply clothing—it was an expression of their collective identity, values, and mission, intricately coded with meaning and tradition. While the habit’s silhouette may be familiar to many Catholics of a certain age, few understand the precision, creativity, and meaning stitched into every pleat.This article chronicles a research initiative which documents, analyzes, and reconstructs the traditional habit of the Sisters of Charity of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/544/image/coversmallDocumenting and Replicating the Traditional Habit of the Sisters of Charity of New York2026-04-04text/htmlen-USDocumenting and Replicating the Traditional Habit of the Sisters of Charity of New York2026-04-042026TWOProject MUSE®456752026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-04