Around Campus STM to Honor Distinguished Alumna

Catholic theologian and ethnographer Susan Bigelow Reynolds will deliver the School of Theology and Ministry’s annual Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., Lecture on April 13 in the Heights Room of Corcoran Commons, where she will be presented with the STM Alumni Distinguished Service Award.

Reynolds is an assistant professor of Catholic studies at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology and author of the new book People Get Ready: Ritual, Solidarity, and Lived Ecclesiology in Catholic Roxbury.

Reynolds’ lecture, titled “Basements, Potlucks, and the Orange Line: Listening for God in an Urban Parish,” will draw on stories derived from years of ministry and ethnographic research for her book, which takes an in-depth look at St. Mary of the Angels, a tiny underground Catholic parish in the heart of Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood.

More than a century of local, national, and international migrations has shaped and reshaped the parish’s neighborhood. Today, the church sustains a community of Black, Caribbean, Latin American, and Euro-American parishioners from Roxbury and beyond.

In People Get Ready, Reynolds weaves together archived letters, oral histories, stories, photographs, newspaper articles, and archdiocesan documents to trace how