Rising Expectations: Urban Congregations, Welfare Reform, and Civic Life

Rising Expectations examines the factors crucial to the success or failure of faith-based partnerships, by analyzing faith-based projects initiated in Indianapolis. Civic leaders are calling for a new role for faith-based groups, especially congregations, in public life�in building social capital, delivering social services, and spearheading community development. Partnerships among government, foundations, and the faith-community are innovative, and many appear to offer promise. However, many factors are crucial to the success or failure of these partnerships. Rising Expectations challenges many of the assumptions on which these reforms are based and offers a realistic assessment of what congregations can and cannot reasonably be expected to do.

Rising Expectations is the first in The Polis Center Series on Religion and Urban Culture from Indiana University Press.

Souls of the City: Metropolitan Growth and Religious Change in Postwar Indianapolis

      Souls of the City will analyze how Indianapolis congregations were shaped by the physical and social mobility that characterized the post-war metropolis. Indianapolis�s transformation from a small city in an otherwise rural county to a complex metropolis occurred precisely at the time that its religious landscape was transformed�from having a predominant mainline Protestant core to a more complex, multi-denominational congregational blend. How these trends were intertwined�and what that intertwining says about the nature of community life in the contemporary metropolis�will be explored in Souls of the City.

Souls of the City is the second in The Polis Center Series on Religion and Urban Culture from Indiana University Press.

A Public Charity: Religion and Social Welfare in Indianapolis

      A Public Charity examines the social matrix of 20th century Indianapolis to reveal how religion was a key factors in shaping both private and public welfare. Historically, religion and social welfare have been intimately connected. In America, religious boundaries helped define social welfare even as the public welfare state expanded its responsibilities during the New Deal and the Great Society�then helped define the boundaries as welfare state shrank in more recent times. A Public Charity will explore the role faith-based organizations have played in the city�s social welfare system, both public and private, and analyze how have religious institutions, beliefs and cultural values have affected the operation of that system.

A Public Charity is under contract with Indiana University Press as part of The Polis Center Series on Religion and Urban Culture. The publishing date has not yet been set, but the book's prospectus is available here.