With contributions from leading religious studies scholars this is a comprehensive overview of the relationship between religion and death. This is the first and only book to be written at an accessible undergraduate level and has the potential to be adopted widely. This new edition has been thoroughly updated to cover new debates and developments for example end of life ethics and the hospice movement. This new edition also considers emerging phenomena such as public shrines, the COVID-19 pandemic, funeral celebrants, death with dignity, spiritual bereavement groups, and online funeral practices.

With contributions from leading religious studies scholars this is a comprehensive overview of the relationship between religion and death. This is the first and only book to be written at an accessible undergraduate level and has the potential to be adopted widely. This new edition has been thoroughly updated to cover new debates and developments for example end of life ethics and the hospice movement. This new edition also considers emerging phenomena such as public shrines, the COVID-19 pandemic, funeral celebrants, death with dignity, spiritual bereavement groups, and online funeral practices.

Parishes are the missing middle in studies of American Catholicism. Between individual Catholics and a global institution, the thousands of local parishes are where Catholicism gets remade. American Parishes showcases what social forces shape parishes, what parishes do, how they do it, and what this says about the future of Catholicism in the United States. Expounding an embedded field approach, this book displays the numerous forces currently reshaping American parishes. It draws from sociology of religion, culture, organizations, and race to illuminate basic parish processes, like leadership and education, and ongoing parish struggles like conflict and multiculturalism. American Parishes brings together contemporary data, methods, and questions to establish a sociological re-engagement with Catholic parishes and a Catholic re-engagement with sociological analysis. Contributions by leading social scientists highlight how community, geography, and authority intersect within parishes. It illuminates and analyzes how growing racial diversity, an aging religious population, and neighborhood change affect the inner workings of parishes. Contributors: Gary J. Adler Jr., Nancy Ammerman, Mary Jo Bane, Tricia C. Bruce, John A. Coleman, S.J., Kathleen Garces-Foley, Mary Gray, Brett Hoover, Courtney Ann Irby, Tia Noelle Pratt, and Brian Starks

Parishes are the missing middle in studies of American Catholicism. Between individual Catholics and a global institution, the thousands of local parishes are where Catholicism gets remade. American Parishes showcases what social forces shape parishes, what parishes do, how they do it, and what this says about the future of Catholicism in the United States. Expounding an embedded field approach, this book displays the numerous forces currently reshaping American parishes. It draws from sociology of religion, culture, organizations, and race to illuminate basic parish processes, like leadership and education, and ongoing parish struggles like conflict and multiculturalism. American Parishes brings together contemporary data, methods, and questions to establish a sociological re-engagement with Catholic parishes and a Catholic re-engagement with sociological analysis. Contributions by leading social scientists highlight how community, geography, and authority intersect within parishes. It illuminates and analyzes how growing racial diversity, an aging religious population, and neighborhood change affect the inner workings of parishes. Contributors: Gary J. Adler Jr., Nancy Ammerman, Mary Jo Bane, Tricia C. Bruce, John A. Coleman, S.J., Kathleen Garces-Foley, Mary Gray, Brett Hoover, Courtney Ann Irby, Tia Noelle Pratt, and Brian Starks

While religious communities often stress the universal nature of their beliefs, it remains true that people choose to worship alongside those they identify with most easily. Multiethnic churches are rare in the United States, but as American attitudes toward diversity change, so too does the appeal of a church that offers diversity. Joining such a community, however, is uncomfortable-worshippers must literally cross the barriers of ethnic difference by entering the religious space of the ethnically "other." Through the story of one multiethnic congregation in Southern California, Kathleen Garces-Foley examines what it means to confront the challenges in forming a religious community across ethnic divisions and attracting a more varied membership.

It is commonly accepted that the way to build church growth is to target specific ethnic or racial groups. People prefer to worship with their own, the theory goes, and if growth is what you want you have to accept that fact. In this book Kathleen Garces-Foley challenges the accepted wisdom and puts forth an alternative hypothesis about the role of a multi-cultural ideology in integrating a range of ethnic and generational groups. Through the story of one Asian-American-led multiethnic congregation in Southern California, Evergreen Baptist Church, she seeks to understand how the multiethnic church works as a new and unique social institution. The driving force behind the formation of multiethnic churches, Garces-Foley says, is a new generation of Christians who have been raised in diverse urban settings and have internalized a value for diversity as taught in the public schools. In the case of Evergreen, she finds, many of the younger members learned about the evangelical theology of racial reconciliation in Bible study groups such as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and after graduation sought out a multiethnic church where they could put their theological commitment into action. In response to the demand for greater diversity in religious life, churches are increasingly adopting a multiethnic identity and looking for strategies for managing the conflicts that inevitably emerge in diverse settings. Evergreen, Garces-Foley shows, has been successful in reframing these conflicts into opportunities for Christian growth, through a "theology of discomfort." This strategy turns on its head the idea that the Church is supposed to be a place of comfort, and challenges members to embrace the discomfort of cross-cultural exchanges as integral to Christian discipleship. By stressing the sacrifice of comfort required in the multiethnic church, Evergreen and parishes like it inspire members to bear the costs of diversity. Moreover, to the extent that these churches encourage members to take their commitment for racial reconciliation beyond the church walls, they are participating in a larger social discourse about racial justice and may have a positive role to play in the future of our multiethnic society.