Author: Chester Gillis
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231551215
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 415
Get Book Here
Book Description
Who are American Catholics and what do they believe and practice? How has American Catholicism influenced and been influenced by American culture and society? This book examines the history of American Catholics from the colonial era to the present, with an emphasis on changes and challenges in the contemporary church. Chester Gillis chronicles America Catholics: where they have come from, how they have integrated into American society, and how the church has influenced their lives. He highlights key events and people, examines data on Catholics and their relationship to the church, and considers the church’s positions and actions on politics, education, and gender and sexuality in the context of its history and doctrines. This second edition of Roman Catholicism in America pays particular attention to the tumultuous past twenty years and points toward the future of the religion in the United States. It examines the unprecedented crisis of sexual abuse by priests—the legal, moral, financial, and institutional repercussions of which continue to this day—and the bishops’ role in it. Gillis also discusses the election of Pope Francis and the controversial role Catholic leadership has played in American politics.
Author: Charles Morris
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307797910
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 529
Get Book Here
Book Description
"A cracking good story with a wonderful cast of rogues, ruffians and some remarkably holy and sensible people." --Los Angeles Times Book Review Before the potato famine ravaged Ireland in the 1840s, the Roman Catholic Church was barely a thread in the American cloth. Twenty years later, New York City was home to more Irish Catholics than Dublin. Today, the United States boasts some sixty million members of the Catholic Church, which has become one of this country's most influential cultural forces. In American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church, Charles R. Morris recounts the rich story of the rise of the Catholic Church in America, bringing to life the personalities that transformed an urban Irish subculture into a dominant presence nationwide. Here are the stories of rogues and ruffians, heroes and martyrs--from Dorothy Day, a convert from Greenwich Village Marxism who opened shelters for thousands, to Cardinal William O'Connell, who ran the Church in Boston from a Renaissance palazzo, complete with golf course. Morris also reveals the Church's continuing struggle to come to terms with secular, pluralist America and the theological, sexual, authority, and gender issues that keep tearing it apart. As comprehensive as it is provocative, American Catholic is a tour de force, a fascinating cultural history that will engage and inform both Catholics and non-Catholics alike. "The best one-volume history of the last hundred years of American Catholicism that it has ever been my pleasure to read. What's appealing in this remarkable book is its delicate sense of balance and its soundly grounded judgments." --Andrew Greeley
Author: William V. D'Antonio
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442219939
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Get Book Here
Book Description
American Catholics in Transition reports on five surveys carried out at six year intervals over a period of 25 years, from 1987 to 2011. The surveys are national probability samples of American Catholics, age 18 and older, now including four generations of Catholics. Over these twenty five years, the authors have found significant changes in Catholics’ attitudes and behavior as well as many enduring trends in the explanation of Catholic identity. Generational change helps explain many of the differences. Many millennial Catholics continue to remain committed to and active in the Church, but there are some interesting patterns of difference within this generation. Hispanic Catholics are more likely than their non-Hispanic peers to emphasize social justice issues such as immigration reform and concern for the poor; and while Hispanic millennial women are the most committed to the Church, non-Hispanic millennial women are the least committed to Catholicism. In this fifth book in the series, the authors expand on the topics that were introduced in the first four editions. The authors are able to point to dramatic changes in and across generations and gender, especially regarding Catholic identity, commitment, parish life, and church authority. William V. D’Antonio, Michele Dillon, and Mary L. Gautier provide timely information pertaining to Catholics’ views regarding current pressing issues in the Church, such as the priest shortage and alternative liturgical arrangements and same-sex marriage. The authors, also, provides the first full portrayal of how the growing numbers of Hispanic Catholics in the U.S. are changing the Church.
Author: Christian Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199341087
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Get Book Here
Book Description
Best Review at the Catholic Press Association Convention Studies of young American Catholics over the last three decades suggest a growing crisis in the Catholic Church: compared to their elders, young Catholics are looking to the Church less as they form their identities, and fewer of them can even explain what it means to be Catholic and why that matters. Young Catholic America, the latest book based on the groundbreaking National Study of Youth and Religion, explores a crucial stage in the life of Catholics. Drawing on in-depth surveys and interviews of Catholics and ex-Catholics ages 18 to 23--a demographic commonly known as early "emerging adulthood"--leading sociologist Christian Smith and his colleagues offer a wealth of insight into the wide variety of religious practices and beliefs among young Catholics today, the early influences and life-altering events that lead them to embrace the Church or abandon it, and how being Catholic affects them as they become full-fledged adults. Beyond its rich collection of statistical data, the book includes vivid case studies of individuals spanning a full decade, as well as insight into the twentieth-century events that helped to shape the Church and its members in America. An innovative contribution to what we know about religion in the United States and the evolving Catholic Church, Young Catholic America is the definitive source for anyone seeking to understand what it means to be young and Catholic in America today.
Author: D. G. Hart
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501751972
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Get Book Here
Book Description
American Catholic places the rise of the United States' political conservatism in the context of ferment within the Roman Catholic Church. How did Roman Catholics shift from being perceived as un-American to emerging as the most vocal defenders of the United States as the standard bearer in world history for political liberty and economic prosperity? D. G. Hart charts the development of the complex relationship between Roman Catholicism and American conservatism, and shows how these two seemingly antagonistic ideological groups became intertwined in advancing a certain brand of domestic and international politics. Contrary to the standard narrative, Roman Catholics were some of the most assertive political conservatives directly after World War II, and their brand of politics became one of the most influential means by which Roman Catholicism came to terms with American secular society. It did so precisely as bishops determined the church needed to update its teaching about its place in the modern world. Catholics grappled with political conservatism long before the supposed rightward turn at the time of the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Hart follows the course of political conservatism from John F. Kennedy, the first and only Roman Catholic president of the United States, to George W. Bush, and describes the evolution of the church and its influence on American politics. By tracing the roots of Roman Catholic politicism in American culture, Hart argues that Roman Catholicism's adaptation to the modern world, whether in the United States or worldwide, was as remarkable as its achievement remains uncertain. In the case of Roman Catholicism, the effects of religion on American politics and political conservatism are indisputable.
Author: William V. D'Antonio
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742552159
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Get Book Here
Book Description
American Catholics Today presents trends in American Catholic opinion from 1987 to 2005, using four identical surveys. These surveys depict trends in Catholics' views of the sacraments, church authority, church teachings in the area of sex and gender, and strength of Catholic identity. This book suggests that the future will see more Catholics making decisions about their own faith and fewer Catholics who are fervently committed to church life.
Author: Mark Silk
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549431
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 437
Get Book Here
Book Description
Catholics constitute the largest religious community in the United States. Yet most American Catholics have never known a time when their church was not embroiled in controversies over liturgy, religious authority, cultural change, and gender and sexuality. Today, these arguments are taking place against the backdrop of Pope Francis’s progressive agenda and the resurgence of the clergy sexual abuse crisis. What is the future of Catholicism in America? This volume considers the prospects at a pivotal moment. Contributors—scholars from sociology, theology, religious studies, and history—look at the church’s evolving institutional structure, its increasing ethnic diversity, and its changing public presence. They explore the tensions among members of the hierarchy, between clergy and laity, and along lines of ethnicity, immigration status, class, generation, political affiliation, and degree of religious commitment. They conclude that American Catholicism’s future will be pluriform—reflecting the variety of cultural, political, ideological, and spiritual points of view that typify the multicultural, democratic society of which Catholics constitute so large a part.
Author: Leslie Woodcock Tentler
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252196
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 417
Get Book Here
Book Description
A sweeping history of American Catholicism from the arrival of the first Spanish missionaries to the present This comprehensive survey of Catholic history in what became the United States spans nearly five hundred years, from the arrival of the first Spanish missionaries to the present. Distinguished historian Leslie Tentler explores lay religious practice and the impact of clergy on Catholic life and culture as she seeks to answer the question, What did it mean to be a “good Catholic” at particular times and in particular places? In its focus on Catholics' participation in American politics and Catholic intellectual life, this book includes in-depth discussions of Catholics, race, and the Civil War; Catholics and public life in the twentieth century; and Catholic education and intellectual life. Shedding light on topics of recent interest such as the role of Catholic women in parish and community life, Catholic reproductive ethics regarding birth control, and the Catholic church sex abuse crisis, this engaging history provides an up-to-date account of the history of American Catholicism.
Author: Peter R. D'Agostino
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807855157
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 422
Get Book Here
Book Description
For years, historians have argued that Catholicism in the United States stood decisively apart from papal politics in European society. Drawing on previously unexamined documents from Italian state collections and newly opened Vatican archives, Peter D'Agostino paints a starkly different portrait.
Author: Timothy Gordon
Publisher: Crisis Publications
ISBN: 1622828372
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Get Book Here
Book Description
Some Christians decry the deism of our Founding Fathers, claiming that outright anti-Christian principles lie at the heart of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, crippling from birth our beloved republic. Here philosopher Timothy Gordon forcefully disagrees, arguing that while anti-Catholic bias kept them from admitting their reliance on Aristotle, Aquinas, and the early Jesuits, our Protestant and Enlightenment Founding Fathers secretly held Catholic views about politics and nature. Had they fully adhered to Catholic principles, argues Gordon, the Catholic republic that is America from its birth would not today be on the verge of social collapse. The instinctive Catholicism of our Founders would have prevented the cancerous growth of the state, our subsequent loss of liberties, the destruction of families, abortion on demand, the death of free markets, and the horrors of today's pervasive pagan culture. In Catholic Republic, Gordon recounts our nation's clandestine history of publicly repudiating, yet privately relying on, Catholic ideas about politics and nature. At this late hour in the life of the Church and the world, America still can be saved, claims Gordon, if only we soon return to the Catholic principles that are the indispensable foundation of all successful republics.
