I would like to invite you to the virtual launch of Catholic Activism Today: Individual Transformation and the Struggle for Social Justice (NYU Press 2020). The launch is sponsored by the Frances G. Harpst Center for Catholic Thought and Culture at the University of San Diego and will be held over Zoom on Tuesday, October 6th, at 2pm Pacific Time. You can get more information, including how to register, on this flyer.

My review of Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II (OUP 2019) just came out in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Stephen Bullivant’s book is an excellent study of the ways wider Catholic social worlds in the United States and Britain changed over the 1900s. By demonstrating the various ways Catholics’ social ties and identity weakened, Bullivant paints a far richer picture of Catholic disaffiliation over the last generations than more reductionist schemas have proposed. It is relevant to several audiences, as I note in my review:

This book would prove useful to multiple audiences. Most obviously, it would appeal to historians, sociologists, and pastoral theologians of Catholicism. It also provides contributions to theories of disaffiliation as well as that of community and social networks. Insofar as religious disaffiliation is not unique to Catholicism, this book likewise provides insights for those who study exiting in other denominations or even in institutions more broadly. The book could likewise be very illuminating to Catholic leaders seeking to foster a greater sense of Catholic imagination in their parish or diocese.