Shared Parish

Asfaith communities in the United States grow increasingly more diverse, manychurches are turning to the shared parish, a single church facilityshared by distinct cultural groups who retain their own worship and ministries.The fastest growing and most common of these are Catholic parishes shared byLatinos and white Catholics. Shared parishes remain one of the few institutionsin American society that allows cultural groups to maintain their own languageand customs while still engaging in regular intercultural negotiationsover the sharedspace.Thisbook explores the shared parish through an in-depth ethnographic study of aRoman Catholic parish in a small Midwestern city demographically transformed byMexican immigration in recent decades. Through its depiction of shared parishlife, the book argues for new ways of imagining the U.S. Catholic parish as anorganization. The parish, argues Brett C. Hoover, must be conceived as botha congregation and part of a centralized system, and as onepiece in a complex social ecology. The Shared Parish alsoposits that the search for identity and adequate intercultural practice in suchparishes might call fornew approaches to cultural diversity in U.S. society, beyond assimilation ormulticulturalism. We must imagine a religious organization that accommodatesboth the need for safe space within distinct groups and for social networksthat connect these groups as they struggle to respectfully co-exist.

The book is a welcome addition to the contemporary discussion about parish life in the United States., Perhaps the greatest value of the bookis to be found in the chapter Hoover devotes to promoting a theory of the shared parish. He explores how this parish can function administratively as one church while maintaining & two distinct cultural communities operating in parallelEnglish and Spanish, Euro-American and Latino, each with its own masses in ministries., []The Shared Parishis a book that creatively presents the cultural and religious transformation happening in Catholic places of worship and challenges scholars from the social sciences and theology to engage in further research on this growing phenomenon of shared parishes., Offers a full, rich, and highly satisfying analysis of the challenge of diversity in the Roman Catholic church of America. Yes, we know that broad demographic shifts are affecting the the Catholic church, but this book finally gives an intimate, contextually rich, and theologically astute presentation of ground-level workings of cultural diversity among faithful Catholics who strive to achieve unity amidst their clashing cultural heritages., Trained in theology and social science, adept in Catholic culture and in Spanish, Brett Hoover brilliantly captures the distinctly Catholic phenomenon of the shared parish. He writes with insight and compassion about the alternately tense and calm encounters that take place when two different groups find themselves living religiously together.

Brett C. Hoover is Assistant Professor of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. His previous books include Comfort: An Atlas for the Body and Soul.