Fr. Stephen M. Koeth, C.S.C.

Fr. Stephen M. Koeth, C.S.C. is an urban, religious, and political historian of twentieth-century America. His research focuses on U.S. Catholic involvement in postwar metropolitan development, including urban renewal projects, public housing, and suburbanization, and the effects of these interactions on Catholic faith and politics.

 

His first book, Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America, was published (August 2025) by The University of Chicago Press’ Historical Studies of Urban America Series. Based on his doctoral dissertation, which received the American Catholic Historical Association's 2019 John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award and Columbia University's 2020 Bancroft Dissertation Award, it explores the effects of postwar suburbanization on American Catholic parish life and politics. By examining the creation and expansion of the Diocese of Rockville Centre in suburban Long Island, it argues that suburbia revolutionized the sacred space of the parish, the relationship between clergy and laity, conceptions of Catholic education, and Catholic participation in American politics.

 

Born and raised in Staten Island, New York, Fr. Koeth earned both a B.A. in History (1999) and an M.Div. (2006) from Notre Dame and was ordained a Holy Cross priest in 2007. He completed an M.A. in History at The Catholic University of America in 2012, and in 2020 was awarded a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University.

 

With grant support from the Louisville Institute and Notre Dame's Poverty Initiative, Fr. Koeth is currently working on a new book project tentatively titled, Unless the Lord Builds the House: A Religious History of U.S. Public and Affordable Housing. This project explores the crucial role that American Catholics and their ecumenical religious partners played in the planning and building, inhabiting and abandoning, razing and reimagining of public and affordable housing projects from the New Deal to today.

 

Fr. Koeth’s research has been supported by grants from The Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, The Catholic University of America, The American Catholic Historical Association, The Sacred Heart Institute of the Archdiocese of New York and the Dioceses of Brooklyn and Rockville Centre, and The Center for Research on Global Catholicism at St. Louis University. His scholarship has been published in the Journal of Church and State, U.S. Catholic Historian, and American Catholic Studies, and his commentary has appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Times, U.S. Catholic, and on BBC Radio 4's Sunday. Fr. Koeth serves as priest-in-residence in Stanford Hall.