Three Books of Note
James M. O’Toole
The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America
Harvard University Press, 2008
James O’Toole, professor of history at Boston College, writes a fascinating and provocative account of American Catholic life from a novel perspective. He tells the story from the point of view of lay men and women and the church life they experienced. So the reader does not have to squint past the activities of bishops and institutions in order to get a glimpse of what the religious lives of ordinary people were like—their devotions, the associations they belonged to, the way they related to the clergy and the hierarchy.
One of the most interesting aspects of O’Toole’s account is how inventive and resilient lay Catholics were in creating a church life that responded to their needs even when—as for much of the 18th and early 19th centuries—theirs was largely a priestless church and bishops were distant figures with limited influence on their lives. Another provocative part of this history are the experiments in democratic diocesan and parish organization that the conditions of an essentially frontier life encouraged. O’Toole’s chapters on the immigrant church of the 19th century and the era he calls “the church of Catholic Action,” where most Catholics now in their fifties and older grew up, are a reminder of both the good and the bad of the richly elaborated church life in those years. Seeing these eras in the context of the church life that preceded them is a useful antidote to the assumption that the pre-Vatican-II American Catholic church was a normative Golden Age that somehow should be restored. The final chapter, on the church of the twenty-first century, sketches a picture of church life that is remarkably like the one with which the book begins—where new populations swell the numbers of American Catholics and lay people take on more and more responsibility for the institutions of church life.
Anyone—Catholic or not—looking to understand American Catholic life today would do well to begin with this absorbing and well told story.
Donna Freitas
Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses
Oxford University Press, 2008
Naomi Schaefer Riley
God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America
St. Martin's Press, 2005
In their reviews of the campus culture at colleges and universities in the United States, Naomi Schaefer Riley and Donna Freitas draw two different conclusions about the relative distinctiveness of Catholic institutions of higher education.
Schaefer Riley limits her investigation to religiously affiliated colleges and universities offering a portrait of what she calls “the missionary generation,” the 1.3 million graduates of the more than 700 religiously affiliated college and universities in the US. In her book, God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America (St. Martin's Press, 2005), she reports on her visits to 20 of these religiously affiliated institutions and suggests that these religious institutions are quite distinctive from their secular counterparts. The Catholic institutions, a subset within the religious category, are notable for their ability to show the harmonizing role of faith and reason.
After providing extensive profiles of six of these schools, Schaefer Riley offers her estimation of the impact of feminism at religiously affiliated colleges, commenting on the interplay of religion and race, and reflecting on the quality of student life on campus with special attention to the absence of political activism. It is, however, on the topic of this last topic - integration of faith and learning - that she says Catholic institutions stand out. Their distinctiveness comes from the fact that “Catholic institutions taught for centuries that faith and reason were not only ultimately compatible but that the further one delved into one, the more developed one could become in the other. Indeed, Catholic schools have historically been responsible for ensuring the survival of the liberal arts in higher education.”
Freitas focuses more sharply then Schaefer Riley on “religion and romance on campus” but, at the same time, more broadly by including both religiously affiliated and non-religiously affiliated US colleges and universities in her book, Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses (Oxford University Press, 2008). She suggests that when considering undergraduate student life, the great divide on American college campuses is not between religiously affiliated schools and secular schools but between evangelical colleges and everyone else.
Combing her quantitative analysis of survey responses from more than 2,500 undergraduates from seven institutions (respondents were 67% female, 86% white, 81% Christian) and the qualitative analysis from 111 semi-structured interviews she conducted (50% male/50% female chosen from respondents to the on-line questionnaire who volunteered to be contacted for interviews), Freitas divides the institutions of higher education in the US into two broad categories: evangelical (self identified as evangelical schools where most students are Christian, students pray and do Bible study regularly, and go to church weekly) and spiritual (public, religiously unaffiliated private, and Catholic schools). Her categories are based on the difference between students at the weekly church-going Christian colleges and the students on all other college campuses where about 80% see themselves as spiritual but not necessarily religious. Her stark claim that when it comes to sex, Catholic schools are little different from public and other private non-religiously affiliated ones offers food for thought.
January 2009
In This Issue
A Fire that Kindles Other Fires
Student Affairs at a Jesuit Institution
Office of the Vice President of Mission and Ministry
Mission and Ministry Website Home
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