There is good news as well as some less cheerful tidings in Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an ethnographic look at Italian-American communal rituals in New York.

The author conducted years of fieldwork at the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Brooklyn, and the book focuses on the men who are central to the production of the parish’s annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and San Paolino (St. Paulinus, the patron saint of Nola, Italy).