The Last Catholic in America PDF Download

Author: John R. Powers
Publisher: Loyola Press
ISBN: 0829430075
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
"It is fast-moving and often downright funny."—New York Times "He has recaptured childish innocence and presented it with adult enlightenment—plus a touch of cynicism—yet never with irreverence." —Book-of-the-Month Club News First confession and its terrors. Eighty-four first graders in a classroom ruled by just one nun. The agony and the ecstasy of Lent. The dubious honor of being declared the worst altar server ever. Dinah Shore and the Blessed Virgin haunting your dreams. This is Eddie Ryan's world as he grows up in the intensely Catholic world of South-Side Chicago's St. Bastion's parish in the 1950s. In this classic coming-of-age novel, John Powers draws readers into Eddie Ryan's world with deep affection and bittersweet humor.

Author: Charles Morris
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307797910
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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"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: Christian Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199341087
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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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: Peter Steinfels
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9780743261449
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
In this national bestseller, the most influential layman in the United States reports that the Roman Catholic Church in America must either profoundly reform or lapse into permanent irrelevance.

Author: D. G. Hart
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501751972
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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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: Marvin R. O'Connell
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
ISBN: 9780873512305
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 632

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"O'Connell presents an excellent biography of the first archbishop of St. Paul, Minnesota, who rose from poverty to become an internationally known clerical figure and friend of presidents. . . . Well written and well researched, this biography brings to life an important figure in American religious history. Recommended."--Library Journal

Author: Carol DeChant
Publisher: ACTA Publications
ISBN: 0879460121
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Eulogies have a long and important history in remembering and commemorating the dead. As Thomas Lynch notes in his Foreword, eulogies are meant "to speak for the ages, to bring homage and appreciation, the final appraisal, the last world and first draft of all future biography." In Great American Catholic Eulogies, Carol DeChant has compiled fifty of the most memorable and instructive eulogies of and by Catholics in America. The eulogies span the American experience, from those who were born before the Declaration of Independence was written to a modern sports legend, from pioneers in social justice, healthcare, and the arts to founders of distinctly American religious order, and from all the varied ethnic cultures who contribute to the great cultural milieu that is the United States.

Author: Brian Burch
Publisher: Image
ISBN: 0553418742
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
What do Buffalo Bill, John F. Kennedy, Ponce de Leon, Dorothy Day, Andy Warhol, and Al Capone have in common? They're all Catholics who have shaped America. In this page-a-day history, 365 entries offer inspiring stories celebrating the Catholic American experience. From famous figures to ordinary people, The American Catholic Almanac tells the facinating, funny, uplifting, and unlikely tales of Catholics' influence on American culture and politics. Spanning the scope of the Revolutionary War to Tom and Jerry cartoons to Notre Dame football, this unique devotional will appeal to anyone curious about how the Catholic faith has intersected with public life over the last three hundred years in America.

Author: Leslie Woodcock Tentler
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252196
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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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: Matthew J. Cressler
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479898120
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Explores the contentious debates among Black Catholics about the proper relationship between religious practice and racial identity Chicago has been known as the Black Metropolis. But before the Great Migration, Chicago could have been called the Catholic Metropolis, with its skyline defined by parish spires as well as by industrial smoke stacks and skyscrapers. This book uncovers the intersection of the two. Authentically Black and Truly Catholic traces the developments within the church in Chicago to show how Black Catholic activists in the 1960s and 1970s made Black Catholicism as we know it today. The sweep of the Great Migration brought many Black migrants face-to-face with white missionaries for the first time and transformed the religious landscape of the urban North. The hopes migrants had for their new home met with the desires of missionaries to convert entire neighborhoods. Missionaries and migrants forged fraught relationships with one another and tens of thousands of Black men and women became Catholic in the middle decades of the twentieth century as a result. These Black Catholic converts saved failing parishes by embracing relationships and ritual life that distinguished them from the evangelical churches proliferating around them. They praised the “quiet dignity” of the Latin Mass, while distancing themselves from the gospel choirs, altar calls, and shouts of “amen!” increasingly common in Black evangelical churches. Their unique rituals and relationships came under intense scrutiny in the late 1960s, when a growing group of Black Catholic activists sparked a revolution in U.S. Catholicism. Inspired by both Black Power and Vatican II, they fought for the self-determination of Black parishes and the right to identify as both Black and Catholic. Faced with strong opposition from fellow Black Catholics, activists became missionaries of a sort as they sought to convert their coreligionists to a distinctively Black Catholicism. This book brings to light the complexities of these debates in what became one of the most significant Black Catholic communities in the country, changing the way we view the history of American Catholicism.