Reviews for Catholic And American

The average rating for Catholic And American based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-11-19 00:00:00 Larry Zearing It must be difficult to write a book about such a large cohort as the Roman Catholic Church. There are multiple angles from with to approach a plethora of themes, beliefs, and cultures. The Basics is a series constrained by word counts, and so choices must be made. Evaluating any book in this series is a matter of deciding how well the author made such choices. Michael Walsh does quite a good job spelling out the essentials of Catholicism. It really is more of a book on who are Catholics rather than what Catholics believe. As Walsh stresses, it's often a matter of what Catholics do rather than what they believe. He describes church polity, sacraments, authority, liturgy, and other basics. The church is far more complex than most people might assume. The choices made by Walsh are sound and reasonable. Such books are difficult to write with verve and pluck, but this is a readable, informative account of a complex subject. I wrote a little more about it here: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-06-19 00:00:00 Thomas Botte I had to read this for a class I took this semester and I have to say that I generally liked it. It's well laid out and explains everything that it needs to explain. On a personal note I found that it worked especially well for my college class because while it discussed Catholicism, it didn't go the "yay, everyone should be Catholic" route. It's pretty rare to find something that isn't overwhelmingly "yay for Catholics" but is brief and doesn't go off into long tangents about everything.