Undoing the Knots by Maureen O'connell
A personal and historical examination of white Catholic anti-Blackness in the US told through 5 generations of one family, and a call for meaningful racial healing and justice within CatholicismExcavating her Catholic family's entanglements with race and racism from the time they immigrated to America to the present, Maureen O'Connell traces, by implication, how the larger Catholic population became white and why, despite the tenets of their faith, so many white Catholics have lukewarm commitments to racial justice.
O'Connell was raised by devoutly Catholic parents with a clear moral and civic guiding principle- those to whom much is given, much is expected. She became a theologian steeped in social ethics, engaged in critical race theory, and trained in the fundamentals of anti-racism. And still she found herself failing to see how her well-meaning actions affected the Black members of her congregations. It seemed that whenever she tried to undo the knots of racism, she only ended up getting more tangled in them.
Undoing the Knots weaves together narrative history, theology, and critical race theory to begin undoing these knots- to move away from doing good and giving back and toward dismantling the white Catholic identity and the economic and social structures it has erected and maintained.
Maureen H. O'Connell is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at LaSalle University. She authored Compassion: Loving Our Neighbor in an Age of Globalization (Orbis Books, 2009) and If These Walls Could Talk: Community Muralism and the Beauty of Justice (The Liturgical Press, 2012). She is a member of POWER (Philadelphians Organizing to Witness, Empower, and Rebuild), an interfaith coalition of more than 50 congregations committed to making Philadelphia the city of just love through faith-based community organizing.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780807007334 |
| ISBN 10 | 0807007331 |
| Title | Undoing the Knots |
| Author | Maureen O'connell |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Beacon Press |
| Year published | 2022-11-15 |
| Number of pages | 272 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |