Brett C. Hoover

Immigration and Faith describes immigration as an ongoing historical reality that human beings understand through distinct, powerful narratives. Such narratives help various groups of people frame and see migration through a discerning lens. In nations like the United States, with strong immigrant histories, the collision and interweaving of various migration narratives helps partially to explain the ever-shifting tensions and political struggles over immigration. Migration stories, however, are not only about immigrants. Internal migration elicits similar cultural, scholarly, and theological narratives—of insiders and outsiders, welcome and fear, loss and success. Whether describing international or domestic migration, these “moving stories” interpret the collective experience both of migrants and others impacted by migration. Receiving communities from dominant cultures have much to say, too, and the stories may be constructed more to speak to their experiences than to those of immigrants. Finally, those who choose to remain in the places from which migrants depart also figure into migration narratives, often subtly and almost invisibly. Any honest account of migration, whether internal or international, must incorporate something of the experience and conditions of all three communities: moving, staying, relocating. Approaching narratives from this trifold perspective reveals migration as the multilateral, systemic reality that it is. †

As faith communities in the United States grow increasingly more diverse, many churches are turning to the shared parish, a single church facility shared by distinct cultural groups who retain their own worship and ministries. The fastest growing and most common of these are Catholic parishes shared by Latinos and white Catholics. Shared parishes remain one of the few institutions in American society that allows cultural groups to maintain their own language and customs while still engaging in regular intercultural negotiations over the shared space. This book explores the shared parish through an in-depth ethnographic study of a Roman Catholic parish in a small Midwestern city demographically transformed by Mexican immigration in recent decades. Through its depiction of shared parish life, the book argues for new ways of imagining the U.S. Catholic parish as an organization. The parish, argues Brett C. Hoover, must be conceived as both a congregation and part of a centralized system, and as one piece in a complex social ecology. The Shared Parish also posits that the search for identity and adequate intercultural practice in such parishes might call for new approaches to cultural diversity in U.S. society, beyond assimilation or multiculturalism. We must imagine a religious organization that accommodates both the need for safe space within distinct groups and for social networks that connect these groups as they struggle to respectfully co-exist.

For readers of Kathleen Norris and Gretchen Rubin, a thought-provoking examination of the meaning of comfort. Comfort is a universal human need. It's that craving to feel at one with the world we live in, warm (but not hot), protected (but not smothered), and secure (but not marooned) in what the future holds. Yet in our increasingly complex and overstressed world, we tend to overlook this important aspect in our lives.In Comfort: An Atlas for the Body and Soul, Brett C. Hoover, a scholar and Catholic priest, explores what comfort means-and it means different things to different people. He delves into the psychological, emotional, and spiritual facets of comfort and offers ways to rediscover it. With insight and humor, Hoover writes about the advantages and the pitfalls of seeking-and finding-comfort as he guides us towards the goal we should strive for: to find comfort in our own lives as we offer comfort to others.By turns lyrical and thought-provoking, funny and poignant, Comfort is full of engaging and unexpected insights in our very human search for personal fulfillment.