Introduction

This chapter introduces the project by articulating why abortion is a contentious issue within British Catholic parishes, evidenced through a parish vignette of a local conflict over anti-abortion activism. The chapter also gives a brief outline of our feminist methodological approach, the research design and research processes. We explain how our qualitative approach provides nuance and detail to existing quantitative datasets. We explain our key theoretical lens—lived religion—which underpins the project. Lived religion has various components, and in this chapter, we outline many of them including an introduction to contextual lived religion, a new concept that we have developed in the book. The chapter ends with an overview of the book.