Many Arts, One Body: Interview with Brett Hoover

The result, says professor Brett Hoover, who teaches theology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, is what he calls the shared parish, or parishes where two or more distinct cultural groups share a building while maintaining their own unique worship and ministries. Hoover, author of The Shared Parish: Latinos, Anglos, and the Future of U.S. Catholicism (New York University Press), spent years conducting ethnographic research on how these parishes function. [...]a balancing act is hard to achieve, but Hoover has some concrete suggestions for how parish leadership- both lay and ordained-can help foster a successful shared parish community. There are virtually no white Catholics in this parish, but it does have several distinct cultural groups, including an English-speaking Mexican American community, a Spanish-speaking Latin American immigrant community, and a Filipino community.