Creative Fidelity American Catholic Intellectual Traditions

Finding themselves in a Protestant nation with little interest and less respect for Catholic habits of mind, often the sons and daughters of immigrants who had no training in the intellectual life of their native cultures, Catholics found themselves challenged to show one could be both Catholic and American. The result was one that Appleby, Byrne, and Portier see as a work of creative fidelity. In this book, the editors offer the reader a chance to see what Catholics from the earliest days to the present grappled with that task. In the process, we gain insight into such questions as, Is there or even ought there be a distinctively Catholic intellectual style? How can Catholics best bring their insights into the nature and shape of the common weal into the public forum to influence debates? Some texts will seem quaint. Others, though, take on immense relevance as one comes to understand the relative poverty of secular ethics in coming to grips with many of the truly great issues that matter most to how a nation ought to live its life. Texts from figures as different as Thomas Merton and John Carroll, Orestes Brownson and John Courtney Murray illuminate the landscape of American Catholic intellectual life. This book is absolutely important for college courses on Catholic life and history, but it will also be fascinating reading for the general reader who wants to understand how the Catholic people made themselves a richly furnished intellectual home in an often hostile land.