His research focuses on U.S. Catholic involvement in postwar metropolitan development, including urban renewal projects, public housing, and suburbanization, and the effects of these interactions on Catholic faith and politics.
Koeth applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America, and shared the following:
Page 99 of Crabgrass Catholicism begins by situating the reader in the Diocese of Rockville Centre in suburban Long Island. Established by the Vatican in 1957 to serve the Catholics of Nassau and Suffolk Counties, the diocese was hailed as the first entirely suburban diocese and is therefore the perfect place to fulfill the aim of Crabgrass Catholicism: to examine the effects of postwar suburbanization on American Catholic practice and politics.Visit the Crabgrass Catholicism website.
The first paragraph of the page focuses on the 1980s and the Diocese’s efforts to encourage fallen-away Catholics to return to the practice of the faith. The phenomenon of religious disaffiliation which became especially prominent in the 1970s and beyond is not the focus of my study. I do, however, conclude Crabgrass Catholicism by arguing that disaffiliation is one long-term effect of the changes that suburbanization ushered into the Church.
Still, the Page 99 Test largely succeeds: the remaining two paragraphs of page 99 serve as a conclusion of Chapter Three and are an apt summary of one of Crabgrass Catholicism’s principal arguments. Namely, that postwar suburbanization “made private spaces, especially the family home,” the “center of prayer and faith formation” undermining the centrality and communality of the parish and heightening the laity’s sense that religious practice was just “another life choice made amid a panoply of social possibilities.”
The urban ethnic parish, established amid late nineteenth century mass immigration, “wove geography, education, culture, family, and faith” into a “highly successful means of providing for immigrants, perpetuating ethnic culture, and passing the faith on to future generations.” But the suburban parish, “formed by rapid population expansion” in the postwar period, lacked not only the physical spaces in which the faithful could gather to “form community, practice charity, and pass on the faith,” but also crucially lacked “the binding forces of ethnic religiosity.” This radically altered not only the Catholic understanding of the parish, and how youth were instructed in the faith, but even how Catholics participated in American political life.
--Marshal Zeringue
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