9/29/2011
September 29, 2011: Commonweal's Thomas Baker reviews Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith.
"The War on Beige"
The search for good resources for adult religious formation is not an easy one. There is the Catechism of the Catholic Church itself, of course, authoritative and imposing, but using it as a text in a parish setting is too much like trying to teach people about baseball with the Baseball Encyclopedia instead of taking them to a game. At another extreme, there are colorful four-page lesson handouts from many publishers, with quick, middle-school-level treatments of many Catholic topics, but studiously avoiding anything that might look too much like doctrine or history. For years, the field has been wide open for someone who could combine actual substantive content with an engaging yet adult-worthy teaching style.
Into this breach comes Catholicism, not just a book but a multimedia extravaganza with ten lavishly produced fifty-minute video programs along with teaching and discussion guides. It is not strictly speaking a catechism: there’s no systematic presentation of the sacraments, morality, Catholic social teaching, or many other staple topics. Instead, it’s a meta-introduction to all that, an attempt to ground us in some creatively presented fundamentals of Scripture and tradition supported by a huge dose of Catholic history and art. Catholicism is apologetics in the grand tradition: triumphant, literate, unashamedly partisan...
Read the rest of the review on Commonwealmagazine.org.
September 29, 2011: Commonweal's Thomas Baker reviews Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith.
"The War on Beige"
The search for good resources for adult religious formation is not an easy one. There is the Catechism of the Catholic Church itself, of course, authoritative and imposing, but using it as a text in a parish setting is too much like trying to teach people about baseball with the Baseball Encyclopedia instead of taking them to a game. At another extreme, there are colorful four-page lesson handouts from many publishers, with quick, middle-school-level treatments of many Catholic topics, but studiously avoiding anything that might look too much like doctrine or history. For years, the field has been wide open for someone who could combine actual substantive content with an engaging yet adult-worthy teaching style.
Into this breach comes Catholicism, not just a book but a multimedia extravaganza with ten lavishly produced fifty-minute video programs along with teaching and discussion guides. It is not strictly speaking a catechism: there’s no systematic presentation of the sacraments, morality, Catholic social teaching, or many other staple topics. Instead, it’s a meta-introduction to all that, an attempt to ground us in some creatively presented fundamentals of Scripture and tradition supported by a huge dose of Catholic history and art. Catholicism is apologetics in the grand tradition: triumphant, literate, unashamedly partisan.
The confident tone is no accident. Catholicism’s guiding spirit, Chicago priest and Mundelein seminary professor Robert Barron, believes Catholics have been crippled by an era in which “the Catholic story is being told by the wrong people in the wrong way,” and he has set out to create an inspiring corrective in which the wrong story (whatever that might be) doesn’t have equal time. Several years ago, Barron coined the phrase “beige Catholicism” to describe a church leached of its intellectual traditions, great saints and art, history, and glorious rituals; on his Web site, Barron points to blandness as the main reason for such discouraging trends as the Pew Forum’s evidence of dramatically declining Catholic allegiance. You won’t, therefore, see neutral colors here: Barron wants to wring every ounce of spectacle from the tradition, and isn’t averse to black and white, either, when it comes to presenting a vision of church...
Read the rest of the review on Commonwealmagazine.org.