Deep Friendships Across Difference: Susan Bigelow Reynolds

Our guest, Professor Susan Bigelow Reynolds, discusses her recent book, People Get Ready: Ritual, Solidarity, and Lived Ecclesiology in Catholic Roxbury.

In People Get Ready, Susan Reynolds draws on six years of ethnographic research to examine embodied ritual as a site of radical solidarity in the local church. Weaving together archived letters, oral histories, stories, photographs, newspaper articles, and newly examined archdiocesan documents, Reynolds traces how the people of St. Mary's constructed rituals of solidarity as a practical foundation for building bridges across difference.

She looks beyond liturgy to unexpected places, from Mass announcements to parish council meetings, from the Good Friday Via Crucis through neighborhood streets to protests staged in and around the church in the wake of Boston's 2004 parish shutdowns. Through ethnography and Catholic ecclesiology, Reynolds argues for a retrieval of Vatican II's notion of ecclesial solidarity as a basis for the mission of the local church in an age of migration, displacement, and change.

Susan Bigelow Reynolds is assistant professor of Catholic Studies at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, where her research focuses on public ritual, culture, and questions of marginality and suffering in ecclesial communities.