Ethnography as a Pastoral Practice

Book excerpt: Ethnography as a Pastoral Practice invites you to open your eyes, ears and hearts to your congregation. By listening to their stories you will not only find out who they are but help them to better claim whose they are. By studying the "texts" of your community, Mary Clark Moschella helps you to understand their "contexts." Moschella will inspire you through actual cases to be more prophetic and priestly in ministry. Ethnography as a Pastoral Practice will, in a step-by-step fashion, help you and your congregation to embrace change and celebrate transformation. This revised second edition incorporates new scholarship on qualitative methods in ethnographic research and their spreading application in seminaries, universities, and divinity schools. As Moschella writes in her reflection on the book fourteen years after the publication of the first edition: "The teaching and practice of qualitative research methods help shape new generations of religious professionals in respectful modes of disciplined inquiry, enabling practitioners to learn about and from the communities they serve." The revised edition includes two appendices by Steve Taylor and Ryan Juskus, respectively, that travel the trail of research blazed by the first edition of this book.