Foundational Social Ritual Practices of Parish Life: Eating, Worshipping, and Hanging Out Together
This book highlights for professional parish ministers the vital importance of the foundational or pre-communal aspects that make a parish community healthy and strong. It provides not a sociology of the parish, but a sociology of the first ingredients that go into making a parish community. It is not, therefore, a book explaining or analyzing the organizational dimensions or social structures that make-up a parish, such as the roles and statuses needed for a parish to function. Rather, the book examines the formation of relationships in the first place within the context of a parish and how such relationships might be maintained over time. Upward social mobility is a deterrent to forming such relationships, while social ritual practices, such as eating together, are a means for establishing and sustaining parish relationships. The book is theoretically grounded in the work of Emile Durkheim who discusses in minute detail the ingredients of social solidarity and community life in his classic work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
Michael J. McCallion received his PhD in Sociology from Wayne State University, USA, and his MA in Liturgy/Theology from the University of Notre Dame, USA. He is an STL faculty member at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit, where he holds the Rev. William Cunningham Chair in Catholic Social Analysis. He is primarily interested in the sociology of religion, spending whatever time he can studying Catholic liturgical worship, the New Evangelization, and parish life from that perspective. His academic publications have appeared in the Review of Religious Research, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Journal for the Scientific Study of Symbolic Interaction, and Contemporary Sociology, among many others. He is also the author of the books Transforming Catholicism: Liturgical Change and the Vatican II Church (2007) and The New Evangelization in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit, Michigan: A Sociological Report (2015).
“At a moment when parish leaders are strategizing how to fill churches again after the ravaging plight of the COVID-19 pandemic, Foundational Social Ritual Practices of Parish Life is particularly timely. Its appearance also corresponds to the call by the Catholic bishops of the United States for a Eucharistic revival over the next several years. This book suggests that such renewal will not succeed by inviting people to attend programs for education and catechesis. Rather, what is needed is the opportunity to simply gather and experience social connection. McCallion argues convincingly that the Catholic Church has precisely what Americans are hungering for: “an awakening story that reveals to them the importance of relationships and the social ritual practices needed for those relationships to flourish” (181). Anyone who is interested in the rejuvenation of Catholic parish life would benefit from reading this book.”
Stephen Wilbricht
Stonehill College, USA; Catholic Book Reviews
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