Foundational Social Ritual Practices of Parish Life: Eating, Worshipping, and Hanging Out Together - Hardcover

Michael J. McCallion

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1527576434 ISBN 13: 9781527576438

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1527576434
• ISBN 13: 9781527576438
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 205