Undoing the Knots cover art

Undoing the Knots

Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness

Preview
Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Undoing the Knots

By: Maureen O'Connell
Narrated by: Erin Bennett
Try Standard free

Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $26.99

Buy Now for $26.99

About this listen

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 Catholicism

Excavating 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.
Christianity Racism & Discrimination Social Sciences Discrimination Social justice
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.