American Catholic Arts And Fictions

Examines how secular transformations of religious ideas have helped to shape the style and substance of works by American writers, filmmakers and artists from Catholic backgrounds.

Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction is a critical study of classic American novels. Ferraro returns to Hawthorne's closet of secreted sin to reveal The Scarlet Letter as a deviously psychological turn on the ancient Meditererranean Catholic folk tales of female wanderlust, cuckolding priests, and demonic revenge. This lights the way to explore what Ferraro calls "the Protestant temptation to Marian Catholicism" in seven modern American masterworks, including Chopin's The Awakening, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Cather's The Professor's House, and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction explores stories of forbidden passion and sacrificial violence, with ultra-radiant women (and sometimes men) at their focus. It examines how these novels speak to readers across religious and social spectrums, generating an inclusive mode of address and near-universal relevance. Ferraro breaks the codes of contemporary criticism in his thematic focus and critical style, going beyond Protestantism and even Judeo-Christian Orthodoxy itself. Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction encourages the attentive reader to think about the American imagination, the myriad arts of writing about the passion plays of love, and even our canonical structures for reading and thinking about literature in new ways.

Roman Catholicism in the United States: A Thematic History takes the reader beyond the traditional ways scholars have viewed and recounted the story of the Catholic Church in America. The collection covers unfamiliar topics such as anti-Catholicism, rural Catholicism, Latino Catholics, and issues related to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the U.S. government. The book continues with fascinating discussions on popular culture (film and literature), women religious, and the work of U.S. missionaries in other countries. The final section of the books is devoted to Catholic social teaching, tackling challenging and sometimes controversial subjects such as the relationship between African American Catholics and the Communist Party, Catholics in the civil rights movement, the abortion debate, issues of war and peace, and Vatican II and the American Catholic Church. Roman Catholicism in the United States examines the history of U.S. Catholicism from a variety of perspectives that transcend the familiar account of the immigrant, urban parish, which served as the focus for so many American Catholics during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.

"American Catholic Traditions gathers together essays that make a new scholarship accessible to a wide audience. The contributors recover and reamplify the voices of such American Catholic pioneers as William F. Lynch and Francis Gigot. Their chorus is joined and enriched by a host of others, from Dorothy Day and the Grail women to Black Elk and the film characters of John Ford. Indeed, the history of American Catholic life and thought holds the kinds of intellectual and spiritual resources needed to renew American Catholic theology and rescue it from abstraction." "American Catholic Traditions offers stimulating resources for recovering the roots of American Catholicism to theologians, teachers, scholars and students, and all those who want to learn and reflect on the roots of American Catholicism and its meaning today."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Since 1965 there has been an explosion of fiction about being Catholic, clearly a result of confusions in the post-Vatican II church. American Catholic culture has suffered severe dislocations, and fiction has provided one way of coping with those dislocations. In Testing the Faith, Anita Gandolfo provides an overview of fiction about the American Catholic experience. The book considers emerging novelists such as Mary Gordon and Valerie Sayers and established writers like Paul Theroux. Among the popular writers covered are Andrew Greeley and William X. Keinzle. The volume also considers the emergence of new, young writers, such as Jeanne Schinto, Sheila O'Connor, and Philip Deaver. By analyzing patterns in contemporary Catholic fiction, Gandolfo shows both the shared interest these writers have in the Catholic experience and their individual perspectives on that experience. The book is the first to consider post-Vatican II Catholic literature, and will be of interest to those concerned with both the Catholic experience and current literature.

What does it mean to be--or to have been raised--Catholic in America today, now that formally nonpracticing Catholics outnumber the memberships of any other single denomination? Catholic Lives, Contemporary America is a collection of informed and spirited essays focusing on Catholic lay practices not commonly recognized or, at times, officially sanctioned. For the formidable array of scholars and writers gathered here, being Catholic is not simply a matter of going to confession or attending Mass, and Catholicism's contributions to American cultural identity remain open to question. Edited and with an introduction by Thomas J. Ferraro, Catholic Lives, Contemporary America offers a banquet of essays and interviews, at once subtle and accessible, treating American Catholic lives and legacies with compassion and flair. Contributors. Patrick Allitt, Paul Crowley, Thomas J. Ferraro, James T. Fisher, Paul Giles, Mary Gordon, Stanley Hauerwas, Frank Lentricchia, Robert A. Orsi, Camille Paglia, David Plante, Richard Rodriguez, Kathy Rudy, Andrew Sullivan, Mary Jo Weaver

This book is a major step toward a fuller exploration of the connection between the visual arts and Williams' concept of the Modernist poem and of his achievement in transcending an art-for-art's-sake formalism to create poems that both reflect their own nature as a work of art and vividly evoke the world of which they are a part.