The Well Versed Catholic

The popular apologist and best- selling author of Catholicism and Fundamentalism addresses fifty-two of the most common misconceptions about the Catholic Faith that are held by many Catholics and Protestants. Drawing upon Scripture and the Catholic tradition, he not only shows the logical errors in these positions but clearly spells out Catholic teaching and explains the rationale behind frequently misunderstood doctrines and practices. An excellent guide to what Catholics really believe and why.

A book to challenge the status quo, spark a debate, and get people talking about the issues and questions we face as a country!

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.

American Catholic universities and colleges are wrestling today with how to develop in ways that faithfully serve their mission in Catholic higher education without either secularizing or becoming sectarian. Major challenges are faced when trying to simultaneously build and sustain excellence in undergraduate teaching, strengthen faculty research and publishing, and deepen the authentically Catholic character of education. This book uses the particular case of the University of Notre Dame to raise larger issues, to make substantive proposals, and thus to contribute to a national conversation affecting all Catholic universities and colleges in the United States (and perhaps beyond) today. Its arguments focus particularly on challenging questions around the recruitment, hiring, and formation of faculty in Catholic universities and colleges.

This book offers a new perspective on the often-overlooked lives of lay women in the English Roman Catholic Church. It explores how over a century ago in England some exceptional Catholic lay women – Margaret Fletcher, Maude Petre, Radclyffe Hall, and Mabel Batten - negotiated non-traditional family lives and were actively practicing their faith, while not adhering to perceived structures of femininity, power, and sexuality. Focusing on c. 1880-1930, a time of dynamism and change in both England and the Church, these remarkable women represent a rethinking of what it meant to be a lay women in the English Roman Catholic Church. Their pious transgressions demonstrate the multiplicity of ways lay women powerfully asserted aspects of their faith while contravening boundaries traditionally assumed for them in an ostensibly patriarchal religion. In fact, the Church could be a place for expressions of unconventional religiosity and reinterpretations of womanhood and domesticity. Connecting together the lives of these women for the first time, this work fills a lacuna in the scholarship of modern Catholic and gender history. Drawing from private collections and numerous archives, it illustrates the surprising range of modes of Lived Catholicism and devotion to faith. Students and scholars of Catholicism, gender, and LGBTQIA+ studies will find significant merit in a book that assigns lay women a more prominent role in the English Catholic Church and offers examples of the flexibility of Roman Catholicism.

Tracing the development of progressive Catholic approaches to political and economic modernization, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy disputes standard interpretations of the Catholic response to democracy and modernity in the English-speaking world—particularly the conventional view that the Church was the servant of right-wing reactionaries and authoritarian, patriarchal structures. Starting with the writings of Bishop Wilhelm von Ketteler of Germany, the Frenchman Frédérick Ozanam, and England’s Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, whose pioneering work laid the foundation of the Catholic "third way," Corrin reveals a long tradition within Roman Catholicism that championed social activism. These visionary writers were the forerunners of Pope John XXIII’s aggiornamento, a call for Catholics to broaden their historical perspectives and move beyond a static theology fixed to the past. By examining this often overlooked tradition, Corrin attempts to confront the perception that Catholicism in the modern age has invariably been an institution of reaction that is highly suspicious of liberalism and progressive social reform. Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy charts the efforts of key Catholic intellectuals, primarily in Britain and the United States, who embraced the modern world and endeavored to use the legacies of their faith to form an alternative, pluralistic path that avoided both socialist collectivism and capitalism. In this sweeping volume, Corrin discusses the influences of Cecil and G. K. Chesterton, H. A. Reinhold, Hilaire Belloc, and many others on the development of Catholic social, economic, and political thought, with a special focus on Belloc and Reinhold as representatives of reactionary and progressive positions, respectively. He also provides an in-depth analysis of Catholic Distributists’ responses to the labor unrest in Britain prior to World War I and later, in the 1930s, to the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War and the forces of fascism and communism.

Hailed by leading South Korean academics as the most significant research on the history of Korean Catholicism to date, Professor Jai-Keun Choi of Yonsei University in Korea explores the origin of the Roman Catholic Church in the Korean peninsula. Professor Choi raises important historical questions as: What were the historical forces that allowed Roman Catholicism to take root in the 19th century Choson Korea despite official governmental efforts to stamp out Catholicism through systematic persecution? What was the Korean populist reaction to Roman Catholic missions? What was the role that native Korean converts played in the spread of Catholicism throughout Korea? With a keen eye to the delicacies of conflicting historical forces, Professor Choi adroitly explains the complexities of the clash of civilizations in the experience of Choson Korea, where Korean Confucianism responded with greatest hostility to Roman Catholicism from the West. This book makes a significant scholarly contribution not only in the study of Korean history but also in such academic disciplines as sociology of religion, anthropology, political science, and international relations.