This essay examines the response of Catholics—both the institutional church and blue-collar laity—to the turmoil of the late 1930s and the rise of the United Automobile Workers in Detroit. It critiques an influential line of scholarship that holds that the ethnic working class was effectively secularized by the rise of mass culture, the welfare state, and industrial unions. Instead, the essay argues that religion—like class, gender, or race/ethnicity—might fruitfully be analyzed as a “consciousness” and, as such, remains fluid, malleable, and protean in the face of historical change. During the Depression years, blue-collar Catholics (especially Catholic men) experienced a re-creation of their religious consciousness to conform to the new world of industrial unionism. While Detroit’s “labor priests” established the Archdiocesan Labor Institute (ALI) and hosted labor schools in parishes across the city, lay people, spurred by the movement for “Catholic Action,” founded the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) to strengthen working-class faith and “Christianize the UAW.” More important, the ALI and ACTU collectively provided a new religious template within which working-class Catholics might reconcile—even intertwine—their class, gender, and religious identities. While the changes of the 1930s did assimilate ethnic Catholics more fully into the secular sphere, this essay demonstrates that such a process did not result in a “decline” in religious significance for many Catholic workers; more precisely, it meant a “re-making” of religious consciousness.

The United States has never had an established religion, but, by the early twentieth century, many Episcopalians had come to think of themselves as the nation's religious establishment. No other denomination, they believed, was as well-suited to provide moral leadership for the nation and unite its people in faith. This article argues that their commitment to a national civic mission provided Episcopalians with a sense of collective purpose that diverted attention from internal divisions and helped propel the church to a position of prominence within American religious life. It also reveals how many of the prime proponents and beneficiaries of the church's ascendancy were members of the social and financial elite. Committed to a patrician creed of social responsibility, these “representatives of all that is noble” gained status and moral authority through their public support of the church and its mission. To trace the contours of the Episcopal ascendancy, this article focuses on developments within the Diocese of Pennsylvania, one of the largest, wealthiest, and most influential within the church. Over the course of the early twentieth century, its members overcame their prevailing parochialism, strengthened their denominational identity, and brought their influence to bear on the nation's religious life. Their exercise of religious and cultural authority can be seen in their support of three ecclesiastical projects—the proposed diocesan cathedral, historic Christ Church, and the Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge— that helped fashion the public image of the Episcopal Church as the nation's religious establishment.

This paper examines a recent arrival on the American pop cultural scene, a type of ghost encounter called After-Death Communications (ADCs). Delivered in dreams, visions, voices, odors, coincidences, etc., these cheerful greetings from deceased loved ones help bereaved survivors cope with their loss. Since the Enlightenment, spirits of the dead have become increasingly irrelevant to collective life. The new phantoms, however, are assigned roles in the family, health, and faith. How has this occurred? Strands of a complicated process are delineated, including medical origins in the bereavement hallucination, a designated symptom of grief. Cultural dynamics behind the current ADC phenomenon are contrasted with national trends that shaped the nineteenth-century spiritualist enthusiasm for ghosts. The literature, published since the 1990s, is reviewed in which the ADC has been formalized as a source of bereavement therapy and revelation. A tally of the peculiar features and functions of this twenty-first-century ghost experience links it to two American industries, psychotherapy and spiritual seeking.