Undoing the Knots
Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness
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Narrated by:
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Erin Bennett
About this listen
A personal and historical examination of White Catholic anti-Blackness in the US told through five 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.
©2021 Maureen O'Connell (P)2021 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"[The author’s] willingness to examine her actions while coming to the realization that, while her intentions have always been good, they do not address the problem, is incredibly refreshing . . . Though the material may be uncomfortable to digest, it is an absolutely necessary read to foster antiracism.” —Booklist
"O’Connell’s…revelation offers some hope to the reader: traditions are constantly evolving. Although Catholicism and anti-Blackness remain entangled, O’Connell believes that connection can be unwound."
—Emma McDonald, Commonweal Magazine
"Maureen O'Connell's important book. . . offers a model for how white Catholics can face up to our histories and find a way forward as people who pursue racial justice." —John Gehring, National Catholic Reporter
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Jay Dolan of Notre Dame University is one of America’s most acclaimed scholars of immigration and ethnic history. In The Irish Americans, he caps his decades of writing and teaching with this magisterial history of the Irish experience in the United States. Although more than 30 million Americans claim Irish ancestry, no other general account of Irish American history has been published since the 1960s. Dolan draws on his own original research and much other recent scholarship to weave an insightful, colorful narrative.
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Should have been great
- By Heather on 04-25-14
By: Jay P. Dolan
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Reconstructing the Gospel
- Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion
- By: Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
- Narrated by: Lloyd James
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove grew up in the Bible Belt in the American South as a faithful church-going Christian. But he gradually came to realize that the gospel his Christianity proclaimed was not good news for everybody. The same Christianity that sang, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound" also perpetuated racial injustice and white supremacy in the name of Jesus. His Christianity, he discovered, was the religion of the slaveholder. Just as Reconstruction after the Civil War worked to repair a desperately broken society, compromised Christianity requires a spiritual reconstruction.
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Disappointing.
- By Elgin Bailey on 04-01-18
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Denmark Vesey's Garden
- Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy
- By: Ethan J. Kytle, Blain Roberts
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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A book that strikes at the heart of the recent flare-ups over Confederate symbols in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and elsewhere, Denmark Vesey's Garden reveals the deep roots of these controversies and traces them to the heart of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the US slave population stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof shot nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, the congregation of Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection.
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Timely, well-written and enlightening.
- By DG on 06-05-18
By: Ethan J. Kytle, and others
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A Fierce Discontent
- The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920
- By: Michael McGerr
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 13 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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The Progressive Era witnessed the nation's most convulsive upheaval, a time of radicalism far beyond the Revolution or anything since. In response to the birth of modern America, one small group of middle-class Americans seized control of the nation and attempted to remake society from bottom to top. They accomplished an astonishing range of triumphs, yet the progressive movement collapsed as the war came to an end amid race riots, strikes, high inflation, and a frenzied Red scare.
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A well balanced take
- By Ryan Mooney on 04-17-21
By: Michael McGerr
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America's Original Sin
- Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America
- By: Jim Wallis
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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America's problem with race has deep roots, with the country's foundation tied to the near extermination of one race of people and the enslavement of another. Racism is truly our nation's original sin. "It's time we right this unacceptable wrong", says best-selling author and leading Christian activist Jim Wallis. Fifty years ago, Wallis was driven away from his faith by a white church that considered dealing with racism to be taboo.
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Important book, but narrator was an amateur
- By RevReader on 06-01-18
By: Jim Wallis
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White Too Long
- The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity
- By: Robert P. Jones
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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“An indispensible study” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) drawing on history, public opinion surveys, and personal experience that presents a provocative examination of the unholy relationship between American Christianity and white supremacy, and issues an urgent call for White Christians to reckon with this legacy for the sake of themselves and the nation.
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The scourge of White Christian Supremacy
- By Buretto on 07-30-20
By: Robert P. Jones
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Do All Lives Matter?
- The Issue We Can No Longer Ignore and Solutions We Long For
- By: Wayne Gordon, John M. Perkins
- Narrated by: Calvin Robinson
- Length: 2 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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The belief that all lives matter is at the heart of our founding documents - but we must admit that this conviction has never truly reflected reality in America. Movements such as Black Lives Matter have arisen in response to recent displays of violence and mistreatment, and some of us defensively answer back, "All lives matter". But do they? Really? This audiobook is an exploration of that question.
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Enlightening
- By karleen on 06-26-20
By: Wayne Gordon, and others
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Faces at the Bottom of the Well
- The Permanence of Racism
- By: Derrick Bell, Michelle Alexander - foreword
- Narrated by: Brad Raymond
- Length: 8 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In Faces at the Bottom of the Well, civil rights activist and legal scholar Derrick Bell uses allegory and historical example to argue that racism is an integral and permanent part of American society. African American struggles for equality are doomed to fail so long as the majority of Whites do not see their own wellbeing threatened by the status quo. Bell calls on African Americans to face up to this unhappy truth and abandon a misplaced faith in inevitable progress.
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This is a classic for a reason.
- By Adam Shields on 12-01-20
By: Derrick Bell, and others
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The Strange Career of William Ellis
- The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire
- By: Karl Jacoby
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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To his contemporaries in Gilded Age Manhattan, Guillermo Eliseo was a fantastically wealthy Mexican, the proud owner of a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, a busy Wall Street office, and scores of mines and haciendas in Mexico. But for all his obvious riches and his elegant appearance, Eliseo was also the possessor of a devastating secret: He was not, in fact, from Mexico at all. Rather, he had begun life as a slave named William Ellis, born on a cotton plantation in Texas during the waning years of King Cotton.
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Fascinating Tale of Racial Passing
- By Steven Schuster on 06-10-16
By: Karl Jacoby
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An African American and Latinx History of the United States
- By: Paul Ortiz
- Narrated by: J. D. Jackson
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning more than 200 years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress, and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms American history into the story of the working class organizing against imperialism.
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I had to return
- By Andrew Alvarez on 05-19-20
By: Paul Ortiz
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The South
- Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
- By: Adolph L. Reed Jr., Barbara J. Fields - foreword
- Narrated by: Langston Darby
- Length: 4 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat, but not a nuanced understanding of everyday life in Jim Crow America. In The South, Adolph L. Reed Jr.—New Orleanian, political scientist, and according to Cornel West, "the greatest democratic theorist of his generation"—takes up the urgent task of recounting the granular realities of life in the last decades of the Jim Crow South.
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Adolph Reed is a master.
- By Will Shogren on 06-07-22
By: Adolph L. Reed Jr., and others
What listeners say about Undoing the Knots
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Michele Jones
- 02-13-23
A Journey of Enlightenment
Excellent and informative travel to the brink of courage and personal responsibility to change. 👍🏽
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