Reviews for Understanding Catholicism

The average rating for Understanding Catholicism based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-08-24 00:00:00 Jim Kirchefer I was able to acquire a great deal of knowledge about Catholicism from this book. As a person who is not a Catholic but having spent my life among many Catholics and having lived with a Catholic woman for the past 13 years, there were many religious concepts that never were clear to me until now. Ms. Hellwig was a brilliant theologist, and this is evident from the way that she crafted her sentences. So many of them contain multiple ideas or multiple explanations that at times I wished that she had written more like Hemingway! Therefore, I found that I had to re-read a number of passages to be sure that I got the gist. Nevertheless, the book is well-written and well-organized. Ms. Hellwig obviously was a Catholic person of deep faith, yet she wrote this book in a manner that respects different views and different religions. Rather than proselytize or preach, she compares and contrasts Catholicism to Judaism, Protestantism, Islam, and other religions and is as objective as she can be, given that in order to explain Catholicism (or other monotheistic religions) properly, the reader must acknowledge the "mystery" aspects of God. I definitely recommend this book to those who would seek a better understanding of Catholicism, and there are a number of books that Ms. Hellwig cited with each chapter as references that would seem to be worthwhile reading as well.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-01-02 00:00:00 tomoki suetsugu This was on the syllabus for a required class I took at Boston College my freshman year. As a cradle Catholic, I was mildly interested in my faith. This book brought things into focus and helped me to understand better how catholic theology evolved, as well as the different veins of thinking that all flow from and return to the same heart. It helped, of course, that the class was taught by an energized Jesuit. Both this specific Jesuit and this book led me down a path of discovery and towards God. It for sure requires some fundamental catechesis and is not a CCD primer.