Church Alive! Pilgrimages in Faith, 19562006 by Greg Dening

Here the author has turned his anthropological, theological, historical and philosophical education, as well as his personal experience, to writing the living history of three Jesuit parishes on the North Shore of Sydney Harbour for the years 1956 to 2006. This book is an ethnographic history of the prophetic imagination among ordinary believers in times of great religious change. It is a narrative about behavior, symbols, rituals, sacred spaces, sacred times, that tells of the cultural system within them. The broader context of post-Vatican II Catholicism and a religion that led the community to this point in time is the backdrop.