Many Faces, One Church: Cultural Diversity and the American Catholic Experience both captures and facilitates a seismic shift in the who, what, where, when, why, and how of Catholic theology today. Along with a diverse group of theologians who represent the many faces of the church, editors Peter C. Phan and Diana Hayes recast the story of the church in America by including immigrant groups either forgotten or ignored and, in light of these new and not-so-new voices, retooling the theological framework of Catholicism itself. That the American Catholic Church is an 'immigrant church' is not news. What is news, however, is how diverse the immigrant church really is and how much work there is to be done to include their voices in theological discourse and training. Beyond the German and Irish immigrants, what of other European immigrant groups such as the Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Eastern-rite Catholics? Where are the stories of the older presence of native Mexican, Native American, and African-American Catholics in this country? And more recently, of Asian-American Catholics, especially the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Filipinos, of the nineteenth and early twentieth century? And more recently still, Catholic immigrants have come from El Salvador, Guatemala, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, India, and the Pacific Islands. What impact are these immigrants having on American society and religious groups? Many Faces, One Church is a profound attempt to address these key questions and their implications for the Catholic way of being church, worshipping, and practicing theology. The result of three years of conferences sponsored by Elms College exploring the 'new faces' of the American Catholic Church, this thoughtful collection highlights opportunities and challenges lying ahead as the American Church tries to respond to the continuing presence of new immigrants in its midst. Many Faces, One Church is a beginning of a long but exciting journey in which the strangers welcomed today into the bosom of the American Catholic Church will be themselves the hosts to welcome, with equal warmth and generosity, the new strangers into their midst so that hosts and guests are truly one.

Many Faces, One Church: Cultural Diversity and the American Catholic Experience both captures and facilitates a seismic shift in the who, what, where, when, why, and how of Catholic theology today. Along with a diverse group of theologians who represent the many faces of the church, editors Peter C. Phan and Diana Hayes recast the story of the church in America by including immigrant groups either forgotten or ignored and, in light of these new and not-so-new voices, retooling the theological framework of Catholicism itself. That the American Catholic Church is an "immigrant church" is not news. What is news, however, is how diverse the immigrant church really is and how much work there is to be done to include their voices in theological discourse and training. Beyond the German and Irish immigrants, what of other European immigrant groups such as the Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Eastern-rite Catholics? Where are the stories of the older presence of native Mexican, Native American, and African-American Catholics in this country? And more recently, of Asian-American Catholics, especially the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Filipinos, of the nineteenth and early twentieth century? And more recently still, Catholic immigrants have come from El Salvador, Guatemala, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, India, and the Pacific Islands. What impact are these immigrants having on American society and religious groups? Many Faces, One Church is a profound attempt to address these key questions and their implications for the Catholic way of being church, worshipping, and practicing theology. The result of three years of conferences sponsored by Elms College exploring the "new faces" of the American Catholic Church, this thoughtful collection highlights opportunities and challenges lying ahead as the American Church tries to respond to the continuing presence of new immigrants in its midst. Many Faces, One Church is a beginning of a long but exciting journey in which the strangers welc

Enfleshing Theology honors and engages the life work of M. Shawn Copeland, whose theology is groundbreaking and prophetic, traversing the fields of Catholic Theology, Black Theology, Womanist Thought, and Semiotics. The book opens with a brief introduction, and then moves to an interview with Copeland, which connects her theology to her life stories. The conversation with Copeland also provides a backdrop to the seventeen essays that follow, extending Copeland's theological worldview. The contributions are divided according to the following sections: embodiment, discipleship, and politics. The essays in the section entitled "Engaging Embodiment" critically reflect on the importance of embodiment in Christian theology and contemporary culture. Following Copeland's lead, authors in this section theorize and theologize the body, particularly (but not limited to) Black women's bodies, as a locus theologicus that reveals, mediates, and shapes the splendor and suffering reality of human existence. The next section, entitled "Engaging Discipleship," focuses on the concrete challenges of following Jesus in today's world. The essays included in this section reflect on Copeland's focus on Jesus' particularity in terms of his solidarity with and for others. Discipleship is about modeling and mentoring, so scholars in this section also comment on Copeland's contribution to teaching and pedagogy. The last section, entitled "Engaging the Political," interrogates the political implications of the theological. It is noteworthy that there are two trajectories of the political here, one is Copeland's development of political theology through the lens of Canadian Jesuit theologian, Bernard Lonergan. The other trajectory focuses on the work of theology in contemporary art and politics. These three sections are fluid and overlap with one another. Several of the articles on embodiment speak to questions of solidarity and a few of the essays on discipleship clearly present as political. The ways in which each of the contributions in this volume overlap with each other attests to the complex nature of doing constructive theology today, and even more how Copeland's work is at the forefront of that multi-layered, polyvalent, intersectional theological work.