
People Get Ready
Ritual, Solidarity, and Lived Ecclesiology in Catholic Roxbury
Susan Bigelow Reynolds(Author)
Fordham University Press
Published on 17. January 2023
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-1-5315-0200-3 (ISBN)
Description
WINNER, COLLEGE THEOLOGY SOCIETY 2024 BEST BOOK AWARD
What does it mean to be a community of difference?
St. Mary of the Angels is a tiny underground Catholic parish in the heart of Boston's Egleston Square. More than a century of local, national, and international migrations has shaped and reshaped the neighborhood, transforming streets into borderlines and the parish into a waystation. Today, the church sustains a community of Black, Caribbean, Latin American, and Euro-American parishioners from Roxbury and beyond.
In People Get Ready, Susan Reynolds draws on six years of ethnographic research to examine embodied ritual as a site of radical solidarity in the local church. Weaving together archived letters, oral histories, stories, photographs, newspaper articles, and newly examined archdiocesan documents, Reynolds traces how the people of St. Mary's constructed rituals of solidarity as a practical foundation for building bridges across difference. She looks beyond liturgy to unexpected places, from Mass announcements to parish council meetings, from the Good Friday Via Crucis through neighborhood streets to protests staged in and around the church in the wake of Boston's 2004 parish shutdowns. Through ethnography and Catholic ecclesiology, Reynolds argues for a retrieval of Vatican II's notion of ecclesial solidarity as a basis for the mission of the local church in an age of migration, displacement, and change.
It is through the work of ritual, the story of St. Mary's reveals, that we learn to negotiate the borders in our midst-to cultivate friendships, exercise power, build peace, and, in a real way, to survive.
What does it mean to be a community of difference?
St. Mary of the Angels is a tiny underground Catholic parish in the heart of Boston's Egleston Square. More than a century of local, national, and international migrations has shaped and reshaped the neighborhood, transforming streets into borderlines and the parish into a waystation. Today, the church sustains a community of Black, Caribbean, Latin American, and Euro-American parishioners from Roxbury and beyond.
In People Get Ready, Susan Reynolds draws on six years of ethnographic research to examine embodied ritual as a site of radical solidarity in the local church. Weaving together archived letters, oral histories, stories, photographs, newspaper articles, and newly examined archdiocesan documents, Reynolds traces how the people of St. Mary's constructed rituals of solidarity as a practical foundation for building bridges across difference. She looks beyond liturgy to unexpected places, from Mass announcements to parish council meetings, from the Good Friday Via Crucis through neighborhood streets to protests staged in and around the church in the wake of Boston's 2004 parish shutdowns. Through ethnography and Catholic ecclesiology, Reynolds argues for a retrieval of Vatican II's notion of ecclesial solidarity as a basis for the mission of the local church in an age of migration, displacement, and change.
It is through the work of ritual, the story of St. Mary's reveals, that we learn to negotiate the borders in our midst-to cultivate friendships, exercise power, build peace, and, in a real way, to survive.
More details
Series
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
553 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5315-0200-3 (9781531502003)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Susan Bigelow Reynolds
People Get Ready
Ritual, Solidarity, and Lived Ecclesiology in Catholic Roxbury
E-Book
01/2023
Fordham University Press
€33.99
Available for download
Persons
Susan Bigelow Reynolds is assistant professor of Catholic Studies at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, where her research focuses on public ritual, culture, and questions of marginality and suffering in ecclesial communities.
Content
Introduction: Unstable Communities of the Faithful 1
1 Beyond Unity in Diversity 30
2 Urban Borderlands 63
3 Receiving Vatican II in Roxbury 88
4 Passion of the Neighborhood 116
5 Ritualizing Solidarity 161
6 Staying Alive 188
Appendix: Interviews 205
Acknowledgments 213
Notes 217
Index 259
1 Beyond Unity in Diversity 30
2 Urban Borderlands 63
3 Receiving Vatican II in Roxbury 88
4 Passion of the Neighborhood 116
5 Ritualizing Solidarity 161
6 Staying Alive 188
Appendix: Interviews 205
Acknowledgments 213
Notes 217
Index 259