01: Alta Mira Press, in association with the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, has recently issued Mountain West: Sacred Landscapes In Transition ($19.95), as part of its series on religion by region.
The book, edited by Jan Shipps and Mark Silk, reveals how the American West is actually three sub-regions in its religious dynamics: the Catholic Southwest, the Mormon areas of Utah and Idaho, and the more pluralistic, and significantly unchurched, states of Colorado, Montana and Wyoming. Yet all of these sub regions are in transition: the Southwest is showing a loss of Catholic hegemony and new evangelical growth (particularly Arizona), both among Hispanics and Anglos, while Colorado, particularly around Colorado Springs, has seen a similar evangelical upsurge.
Mormonism remains powerful in Utah, but “minority” faiths, such as mainline Protestants, are challenging its political influence, even as Mormons show greater interfaith sensitivity and cooperation. One chapter finds that the great distances found between religious communities and enclaves in the Western region that once made for interfaith tolerance is giving way to more conflict as the population density increases.
02: All The Pope’s Men: The Inside Story Of How The Vatican Really Thinks (Doubleday, $24.95), by respected Vatican reporter John Allen, tries to penetrate beyond the mystique and popular images of the pope and Rome to understand the mindset of the international Catholic leadership. RW readers will especially be interested in Allen’s chapters on the psychology and sociology of the Vatican.
In order to understand the psyche of the Vatican, Allen outlines such expected values as authority, tradition and loyalty as well as less heard ones, such as populism (protecting the faith of the masses from a theological “elite”), cosmopolitanism and realism. The sociological realities come into play through the various layers of influence at work in the Vatican: ecclesial and secular Roman, Italian (evident in the slow bureaucracy and stress on personal connections) and the European (as seen in the liberal Vatican tilt on many foreign affairs issues). Other chapters deal with Vatican theology, the sex abuse crisis and the Iraq war).