Parish and Place: Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church

At first glance, sociologist Tricia Bruce offers a book-length study of a relatively rare (8 percent) organizational form of Catholic faith community known as the personal parish. What Parish and Place actually provides, however, is an in-depth sociological analysis of (1) how Catholic faith communities work as organizational structures and (2) why institutional structures matter a great deal more than we might expect in attempts by religious organizations to accommodate difference. Parish and Place tackles these important questions through a well-designed, multiyear mixed-method research project whose quantitative section produced an enviable 80 percent response rate from diocesan officials, and whose qualitative section elicited a level of detail and candor from bishops and priests that seems to have surprised even the author.