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"For generations of American Catholics, the face of their church was, quite literally, a woman's face. McGuinness recovers the compelling story of these sisters and puts them back at the center of American Catholic history." —James M. O'Toole, Boston College "McGuinness writes with the authority of a scholar and the ease of a storyteller. Her portrait of the women who have for so long represented the face of the American Catholic church will be useful to readers who wish to learn about the often hidden and far-ranging contributions vowed women have made to church and nation." —Kathleen Sprows Cummings, University of Notre Dame For many Americans, nuns and sisters are the face of the Cath...
Made doubly marginal by their gender and by their religion, American nuns have rarely been granted serious scholarly attention. Instead, their lives and achievements have been obscured by myths or distorted by stereotypes. Placing nuns into the mainstream of American religious and women's history for the first time, Spirited Lives reveals their critical impact on the development of Catholic culture and, ultimately, the building of American society. Focusing on the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, one of the largest and most diverse American sisterhoods, Carol Coburn and Martha Smith explore how nuns directly influenced the lives of millions of Americans, both Catholic and non-Catholic, through their work in schools, hospitals, orphanages, and other social service institutions. Far from functioning as passive handmaidens for Catholic clergy and parishes, nuns created, financed, and administered these institutions, struggling with, and at times resisting, male secular and clerical authority. A rich and multifaceted narrative, Spirited Lives illuminates the intersection of gender, religion, and power in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America.
Sex is not a simple concept. Focusing on the issue of celibacy, the author explores the cultures of three post-Civil War utopian communities and their relation to female status in American society. From her examination of the Shakers, Koreshans, and Sanctificationists, the author concludes that the adoption of celibacy promoted theoretical sexual equality and female social power in those religious groups. -- Bookjacket.
In Unlikely Entrepreneurs, Barbra Mann Wall looks at the development of religious hospitals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the entrepreneurial influence Catholic sisters held in this process. When immigrant nuns came to the United States in the late nineteenth century, they encountered a market economy that structured the way they developed their hospitals. Sisters enthusiastically engaged in the market as entrepreneurs, but they used a set of tools and understanding that were counter to the market. Their entrepreneurship was not to expand earnings but rather to advance Catholic spirituality. Wall places the development of Catholic hospital systems (located in Illin...
Suellen Hoy's Good Hearts describes and analyzes the activities andcontributions of Catholic nuns in Chicago. Beginning with the arrival ofwomen-religious in 1846 and ending with the sisters' social activism inthe 1960s, Good Hearts traces the development and evolution of thesisters' work and ministry that included education, health care, andsocial services. Contrary to conventional portrayals of religious asreclusive and conservative, the nuns in Good Hearts are revealed asdynamic, powerful agents of change. Catholic sisters lived on the edge, serving sick and poor immigrants as well as those racially andreligiously unlike themselves, such as the uneducated black migrantsfrom the South
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When Americans migrated west, they carried with them not only their hopes for better lives but their religious traditions as well. Yet the importance of religion in the forging of a western identity has seldom been examined. In this first historical overview of religion in the modern American West, Ferenc Szasz shows the important role that organized religion played in the shaping of the region from the late-nineteenth to late-twentieth century. He traces the major faiths over that time span, analyzes the distinctive response of western religious institutions to national events, and shows how western cities became homes to a variety of organized faiths that cast only faint shadows back east....
Why does the Catholic Church take a politically conservative stance on some issues, such as abortion and birth control, while on others, such as social programs and nuclear policy, it resembles the left? Why do some Catholic groups reject the legitimacy of Church hierarchy and yet choose to remain within its fold? To explain these apparent contradictions, Gene Burns examines the origins of contemporary diversity and conflict in the Catholic Church as well as the processes of ideological change. With valuable insights into the American Catholic Church, the modern papacy, and the Latin American Church, The Frontiers of Catholicism is as much a political study of ideological dynamics as it is an institutional study of religious change.
This unique book provides a clear framework and a range of up-to-date tools for assessing patients with eating disorders. Procedural guidelines are illustrated with concrete examples and sample forms.