Category: Catechist Chat

The Kolbe Reviews: Religion

Freedom’s just another word for “knowing what to do.” And then doing it.

I’ve been using the Faith and Life textbook series for homeschool religion since the boy was in first grade.  I loved it then, and still love it now.

 

What you get: Each book in the series has approximately 30 chapters, designed to be read one a week throughout the school year.  (Some years there are more chapters, some years less).  The reading is on grade-level, but the first grade book is designed to be a read-aloud, and the second grade book will be a read-aloud for some students.  Each chapter might be ten minutes worth of reading?  One day’s assignment. At the end of the chapter there are usually some vocabulary words, a scripture or prayer, and some catechism questions and answers.

All except the 2nd grade book feature gorgeous traditional artwork for the illustrations.  The second grade book uses contemporary-school-book genre stuff, but you’ll get over that insult when you get back to 3rd grade and the serious art resumes for the remainder of the series.

Each book has a theme — first grade covers Salvation 101, 2nd grade prepares students for the sacraments of reconciliation and communion, fourth grade is a survey of the Bible, sixth grade is heavy on the moral life.  Along the way you spiral through the essentials of the faith at an age-appropriate level, so it’s possible to jump right in at grade-level even if you haven’t used the texts before, or even ever studied the faith before.

The accompanying Activity Book is a consumable workbook with a combination of study questions and fun activities like coloring pages and crossword puzzles.  Together the two make a complete package for home use — the student does the reading, completes the study questions, and does any of the extra workbook pages as desired.  I let my kids write in the book, but if you did only the study questions on a separate paper, and no fun-and-games, you could pass the book down.

I have looked through the expansive (and expensive) teacher’s manuals, and they do contain a lot of helpful information for the catechist.  But for home use, I think these are not needed.  My advice for a parent who is not very knowledgeable of the faith would be to do the student reading along with the child, and then to learn more about the faith in general by picking out other good Catholic books on topics of interest.

UPDATED: Tara in the combox observes, and I would take her advice over mine:

I find them really really useful because I am not a catechist and I cannot make this stuff up. They have the answers for the activity book pages and have a test / quiz for each chapter and each section (again, answers supplied too). Unless you’re very confident and very experienced, I think they’re well worth the money.

FYI the teachers manuals are huge.  So priced comparably (even favorably) to other works offering similar amounts of info.

I’ve never used Faith and Life in the classroom.  My parish has always used some-other-brand.  I have talked to several catechists from other parishes who didn’t care for F&L, because of the strongly academic focus (a selling point for me — I love it), and because the style of the lessons didn’t call for crafts and activities and so forth.  We did do one test section of F&L for 8th grade last year, and the feedback I received at mid-year from the catechist teaching that class was very good.  Feedback from a 2nd-grade catechist at another parish was that course material was good, but the lessons worked best if the teacher had free reign to present the topics the way she thought the students would learn them best.   I think a lot depends on whether the parish in fact wants students to learn the faith with the rigor expected in other academic subjects, and whether the teacher has the experience and confidence to teach the material effectively.

What you don’t get in F&L:  There’s very little in the way of multicultural imagery, church geography, or even much for lives of saints.  This is a theology course, and you need to plan to fill out your students’ religious education with all the other stuff that makes up our faith and heritage.  If you are going to Mass, observing the feast days, living out in the wider world, praying as a family, and reading lives of saints as part of your literature curriculum, you’re in good shape.  Otherwise, plan to pick up some supplemental materials that will fill in your gaps.

About the Three Editions:  There’s original, revised, and 3rd edition to match the new mass translation.  Don’t worry about it.  If someone gives you an older edition, it’ll work fine. Every now and then one of the assignments won’t line up, but it’s not a big deal.  On the other hand, the books are fairly affordable new.  My personal approach is if I’m going to buy, I buy new, but I’m not upgrading my older stock.

Kolbe also uses the St. Jospeh Baltimore Catechism series.  These are retro-style catechisms, complete with an English translation of the mass that sounds almost like our new mass translation, because, get this: it’s translated straight from the Latin.  Because the books are that old.  The language is frank, the drawings are 1950’s-chic, and yes, I love this one too.  Great discovery.  If you want to justify mowing the lawn on Sundays, don’t let your kids read this book.  No toe left un-stomped.

The course plans.  For me as a catechist who happens to be a parent, the course plans primarily save me the work of writing up my own.  But I think they’d be one of the sets of plans worth purchasing if you aren’t registered with Kolbe, because each day’s and week’s assignments include a summary of the lesson topic, and points to clarify as you teach your student.  Lots of material in the plans.

The planned assignments do call for a lot of memorization and recitation.  Recall that as the teaching parent, you’re free to decide just how much of that memory work your student needs to do.

FYI: The Kolbe plans run on a four-day schedule, and are built around a tutoring-type environment, so they can’t be peeled off the page and inserted into a parish religious education program as-written.   That said, if I were Queen of Religious Ed (I’m not) and had the budget to match my imperial fantasy life, I’d want something like this to give to new and struggling catechists, because the plans to do a good job distilling the faith into the essentials.

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Questions?  Comments?

3.5 Time Outs: Back to Civilization

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who persuades me to write whether I ought to or not.

Click and be amazed.

1.

I’m enjoying being home again.  No more book-craziness for a while, kids are back to school and so far it’s going well, and I’m 10% less jet-lagged every day. If life stays normal, I might be a civilized person as soon as 2014.

2.

This past week, Julie Davis kept using the word “economics” in sentences directed at me.  I remembered vaguely something about having studied these topics in school, and maybe even having some marginal qualifications, and that I had initially started this blog to be about economics and history . . . sheesh.

But the weird thing:  All the whole time I was writing the catechist book, I was thinking, “I just need to knock this thing out so I can get back to my *real* project,” which is the homeschooling book.”

[Not on a topic that competes with Rebecca’s topic, by the way.  The two books should go together great, so buy hers first.]

And here’s what . . . I realized this weekend that now the homeschooling book has become the “gotta get this outta the way” project.  ‘Cause yes.  I wanna write about some Christian money issues.  So maybe I give myself a week or two to breathe, then do the homeschooling book and just get it done, and then maybe, maybe?, Julie can have an economics blog back?

I dunno. I don’t predict the future with any reliability.

3.

Over at AmazingCatechists.com, I posted about using Christian LeBlanc’s new book as teaching resource for catechists. (Some people were asking when I’d post the catechist-version of that review, so now you know.  I cover different topics than I did here.)

I came home with a pile of review materials from the Giant Catholic Conference Thing-y, so it’ll be review-city for a while here.  Or there.  Somewhere. Did I mention how much I love getting new books?  Love it.  Love it.

3.5

I was tooling around the Pauline Media booth, and found this book, which looks very handy to keep in stock at crisis pregnancy centers and the like.

And I was thinking, “Wow, my Spanish has gotten much better, because I can read the whole back cover pretty easily.”  Also, I considered the fact that I could read it to be a reliable signal that the reading level was very accessible, which is always a plus in my book.  But then my plane was very very late getting home Saturday night, so Sunday I went to

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Oh, hey, about those links: It came to my attention that my sidebar is due for some updating.  If you read here, leave your link in the combox.  I’m going to set a goal of doing the update, let’s say . . . September 23rd?  Nope, that’s a Sunday, make it the 24th.

–> FYI I’d love to include not just your personal link, but any recommended sites you think fit with the multitude of themes here.  But do just one link per comment, because otherwise the robotic spam-dragon will consume the whole lot of them.  Thanks!

Book Review: Christian LeBlanc’s The Bible Tells Me So

Christian LeBlanc gave me a review copy of his new book, The Bible Tells Me So: A Year of Catechizing Directly from Scripture, and I’ve already mentioned that it’s a good book and you probably want to buy it.  Today’s my day to tell you why normal, non-catechist people will like it, and then later I’ll post a catechist-type review over at AmazingCatechists.com.

What it is:  Christian put together a survey of the Bible course for his 6th grade religious ed class.  He uses the socratic method, and goes through the whole Bible in a year, explaining to the kids what’s in there, and how the Bible fits into our Catholic faith.  (Quite nicely, thank you.)  In addition to Bible history, he works in bits about the Theology of the Body, the sanctity of marriage, and loads of apologetics.  One of the key themes is how we find the Mass and the sacraments in the Bible.

The Format:  Each chapter is one class.  He starts at the beginning of the school year in Genesis, and walks you through each class as-presented.  (“Hey y’all, welcome to 6th grade . . .you are going to be miserable this year.”) The weird thing: This works.  I’ve been reading Christian’s blog for a long time, but mostly only sort-of reading it, because although the topics are good for me, the truth is that when I’m goofing on the internet, my brain wants to goof off.  And the class-dialog format requires paying attention, thinking, that kind of stuff.

In a book though, the narrative style comes into its own.  The book is large format (8.5″ x 11″), so there’s enough page there to hold some serious thought without overwhelming.  And books are meant for sit-a-spell reading.  You can settle in, dig into a chapter, and enjoy.

The other reason these lectures work better in a book than on a blog is that you get the whole year in a continuous flow.  I never felt like I was reading a blog-warmed over.  Just the opposite.  Even though I had read some (not all) of the ideas on the blog, when they are put together in a single work, and fully fleshed-out, the whole is far more than sum of the snippets.

Reading Level: Very comfortable.  The conversational style, and the fact that this is a class for sixth graders, makes this a great book for someone just digging into the Bible for the first time.  You don’t need to be a Catholic know-it-all before you start.  This would work as a textbook for a middle-school or older student who wanted to study the Bible at home, but the material is substantial enough that any adult would enjoy it.  Great option for a family Bible study.

What good for the non-Catechist?  Well, here’s what:  As it happens, this year our boy is starting the Bible History class that Kolbe does in 7th and 8th Grade.  And it’s been a while since the SuperHusband has done a full read through the Bible (and me? <cough cough> we’re not talking about that), and Jon’s never studied the Bible as a Catholic before.

[Though admittedly Jon has a feel for the Catholic view, since his reversion was due in part to all the unmistakeably Catholic things God stuck in His book.]

So the timing for us was perfect.  As we work through the Bible as a family, Jon & I can consult The Bible Tells Me So for ideas about discussion topics with the kids, things to point out, Mass-appreciation, all that.

Verdict: Pretty much an unqualified ‘buy’ recommend.  I mean, I guess if you didn’t really want to understand the Bible, or find out how Catholics read it, or something like that, you might want to avoid it.  Also if you hate humor.  Don’t read this book if you have broken ribs or nasty cough, and your doctor told you No Laughing.

FYI: Christian haunts this combox, so you can ask him any questions you have.

 

Book Review: Benedict of Bavaria

I picked Benedict of Bavaria for my latest Catholic Company review book because I had a feeling I should.  I didn’t want to.  I’ve developed this gut-reaction to all things Pope-Book, thinking that surely it will be a major effort, I’d rather be reading an American Girls mystery . . . you know the fear.  But I reasoned that a little work would be good for me, so I took the plunge.

I love being wrong.

This was a fun and interesting read, and not difficult at all.   Very enjoyable way to learn more about the Holy Father.

What it is:  The book tells the story of Pope Benedict’s life from his birth in Germany through about 2007.  The focus is on his German heritage — the villages he lived in, life during World War II and conflict within the Church over how to respond to the Nazi regime, and his career as a theologian and cleric in postwar-Germany.   His family life, including the role of his sister Maria in supporting him throughout his life, is a steady theme.

In all it’s a fascinating look at the personal life, career, and heritage of the man who now leads the Church.  An appendix detailing “A Day in the Life of the Holy Father” is particularly interesting in light of the Vatican-Leaks scandal this summer.

Included are excerpts from and analysis of his writings over the years, showing his development as a scholar, and providing inspiration and encouragement to the reader.  The author writes from a Catholic, faithful-to-the-Church point of view, but without glossing over or excusing problems in the Church.

Reading Level: I’d recommend this for adults who have some basic background knowledge of the Catholic faith, and of recent history. The writing is clear and easy to follow for those who read on a true high-school or early-college reading level, but you do need to be the kind of reader who knows words like “Jesuit” “postmodernism” “celebrant” “ora et labora”  and so forth.    A map of Germany is handy to have on hand as well — Google Earth would work fine — because there are so many German place-names mentioned.

Excellent choice for someone who knows the faith, but doesn’t know much about the life of the Holy Father. Also recommended for young men discerning a vocation to the priesthood — great glimpse into the kinds of different challenges our clergy face, from seminary on up through the ranks of the hierarchy.

Summary: Very nicely done.  This one’s a keeper.  Deserves to be better known and more widely read.

 

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I’m grateful once again to The Catholic Company for letting me participate in their reviewer program, in which bloggers like myself get great books for free, in exchange for an honest review — though they seem to mostly stock good stuff, so that makes my job a whole lot easier.

They remind me to remind you that The Catholic Company is also a great online store for all your Catholic gift needs, such as baby baptism and christening gifts. You can also find a wide selection of Catholic Bible Studies for both parish groups and individuals, as well as a variety of other Catholic Bible study resources.

Submission of Will and Intellect?

Over at Amazing Catechists, I take a stab at answering the question: What the heck does the Diocese of Arlington mean when they ask for “submission of will and intellect”?  Hopefully it’s helpful.  Maybe?

–> Joe Poprocki deserves credit for pointing me and others to the issue.  I didn’t link to his post in the AC article because I knew it was being followed by some catechists who feel very hurt by the D of A’s new requirement, and I didn’t want to start a pile-on of any kind.  So if you visit his place, be extra nice.  (I like his blog and enjoy it.  If you read catechist blogs, his deserves your attention.)

Invalid Salad – Real Sacraments, Fake Sacraments, Illegal Sacraments

My latest at AmazingCatechists.com: “Invalid or Illicit? Keeping Straight the Sacraments,” in which I have more fun than I ought, talking about my favorite, rhyming way to keep track of whether a sacrament is illicit, invalid, neither, or both.

What I owe the world is a post about the fabulous Ela Milewsak and the National Initiative for Adolescent Catechesis.  That’s coming, soonish, along with an overdue book review (two here, one there), the end of the Kolbe series, all kinds of stuff.  But this other fun topic came up in conversation this morning, and I couldn’t help myself.  Invalid salad.  I just love to say it out loud.

Why Believe this Jesus-Pope-Church Stuff is Really Real?

Faced with so many Catholics, even the leaders of many Catholic institutions, openly rejecting the teaching of the Church, I had to ask myself last week: Why shouldn’t I go the same way?  If Georgetown and Notre Dame are allowed to call themselves Catholic, why should I feel compelled to avoid their purported errors?  If you can be Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden and not be excommunicated . . . maybe they are the ones who are right after all.  Maybe the Catholic Faith is about our finding our own path, and each doing what he feels is right, and the Catechism is just so many suggestions, helpful to some, not required for all.  Maybe.

Having entertained that thought experiment, what convinces me to persist in my catechism-slinging?  Here’s my list:

1. Jesus was crucified.  If Jesus just wants people to go their own way, do their own thing, why die on the cross?  Those words: “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.”  The Jewish leaders who campaigned for the cruxifiction were, by Jesus’ own words, only doing what they thought they should.  If that’s not a sin, why forgive?

And if truth and the will of God can be molded to fit our situation, and there’s really no need to worry about fine details and firm definitions, why sweat blood in Gethsemane?  If the Father’s will is merely that we each do our own will, Jesus could have slipped off in the moonlight the way he’d done plenty of times before.

There’s a branch of dissenting Catholics who deny the crucifixion and resurrection, treating one or both events as mere myth.  In which case, sure, a mythical God feels no pain, the blood and the anguish must be just as fictional.  But I don’t think the Incarnation is nothing more than an especially glorious fireside tale, because of the next reason on my list.

2.  The Martyrs died for their faith.  An agonizing death for the sake of a little incense?  I don’t think so.  If the ancient faith were a mythical faith, Roman officials wouldn’t have written letters advising each other how to deal with those cantankerous Christians.  A mad man can gather a few suicidal followers for a short time; no one persuades synagogue after to synagogue throughout the whole Roman empire to face death rather than recant a myth, generation after generation.

It is possible the early Church was wrong, and Christianity is not true — plenty of men have shed their own bled in defense of a mistaken cause.  But those who give their lives freely, for the martyrs were never coerced by the Romans — the Romans urged them to spare their own lives with a few simple gestures — those who give their lives freely do so because they believe they must.  That the faith of the Church requires an absolute loyalty to Jesus Christ and no other.  A Christian can, and should, respect the honest unbeliever; but respect is something different from agreement.  In the early Church, “find your own path”, or in the Roman style, make Jesus just one more god in the pantheon, this it’s-all-good-enough Christianity was no Christianity at all.

3. I’m not ready to throw the saints under the bus.  Were all these martyrs and saints who insisted on one Lord, one Faith, one Truth — were they kindly people sorely mistaken?  Did the Holy Spirit’s promise to lead us into all truth tarry a while, and we didn’t get the real faith handed on until 1960-something?  When we canonize someone, we don’t claim their every word was Gospel, their every action impeccable.  Saints err.  This saint didn’t reason into the Immaculate Conception, that saint had a bad temper, and there’s an alarming amount of disagreement about dress codes and attachment parenting.  (I suppose the modern Church is very saintly that way.)

But every single saint, all of them, wrong about the same basic facts about the faith?  Saint Thomas Aquinas as a jolly old fellow who gave it his best on theology, buy the man a beer and tell him that really there’s nothing particular to know about Jesus, but thank you for getting so many Dominicans off the streets and into the university?  Saints Isaac Jogues and Kateri Tekawitha showing their remarkable pluck, and hey, there’s room in the celestial sweat lodge, relax and try some pantheism for a while, you look like you could do with a change  — it’s all the same thing anyway — hey, what happened to your hands, buddy?

Nope.  My brain just won’t go there.  Because of my final reason.

4. I’m sane.  I mean that in the most charitable way.  (And the most limited way.)  I spent two decades in school, learning “creativity” and “critical thinking”, which was education-code for “outlandish is good” and “If you can convince people, it must be true.”  I had a harrowing moment in business school when I persuaded my accounting professor the wrong answer was in fact correct — the assignment was to argue the assigned position, so I did.  It was wrong, and anyone with half a brain could see it.  But I could argue well. I persuaded her.  It was my first brush with the darkness of dishonesty.  After that I quit going along so nicely with inane assignments.  I graduated anyhow.

But I didn’t really learn how to reason — that is, to find the truth — until after I reverted.  In returning to the Church, I was beseiged by arguments against the Catholic Faith not from the anything-goes crowd, but from sincere and fervent evangelical friends.  The stakes were high: My own spouse was now a born-again evangelical (protestant) Christian.  Try telling someone five years into a happy marriage that he’s gotta start using NFP, and by the way, our marriage isn’t valid and we need to get a priest to fix it.  The man had good reasons to doubt the credibility of the Church before; now the ol’ Mother-n-Teacher is intruding into his bedroom and making his wife think crazy-wacky-papist-talk.

You can’t buy into “it’s all the same thing” when your good friends are giving you books telling you the Church is the Dominion of Satan.  You have to answer the question.  You have to examine the evidence, and decide one thing is true and another is false.  No quantity of parables about blind men feeling the elephant can make Satan and Jesus into the head and tail of a big grey spirituality that squirts water out its trunk.

I could choose not to know the answer about God — to be agnostic about Christianity the way I am agnostic about evolution.  (I don’t care enough about evolution to have an opinion on it, nor to bother forming one.)  But whereas I could in good faith believe that knowledge of God is unimportant, I could not in good reason believe there is no single answer about God.  Either evolution happened or didn’t, and if it did, it happened in either this way or that.  Species didn’t evolve for those who want that to be their truth, and get plopped down as-written for those who prefer a younger and more predictable planet.  Either Jesus is the Son of God, or he isn’t.  Either He founded a Church, or he didn’t.  Either the Pope is head of that Church, with the ability to teach authoritatively, or he isn’t.

A Catholic can in good faith be unable to answer these questions  — to lack the mental capacity, or the free time, or even the knowledge these questions exist.  But to know these questions abound, and in sound mind believe there are no absolute answers to them?  No.  As certainly as a child knows either the dog ate the cupcake or it didn’t,  sane Catholics know that facts are facts, whether we know the facts or not.   Good faith demands good reason.

The Making of a Lukewarm Catholic

Last week in the comments to “Catholics Acting Catholic”, Anna asks:

How? How does the modern church read the same scriptures as me and MISS that Christ is Lord, He is The Only Way, The. End. ???

The Church is made up not of partisan chunks, but of individuals.  Anna and I agreed it was unwise to speculate on what might make any one person lean this way or that in their approach to the faith.  But I don’t need to speculate about myself.  Before I was a pope-loving, catechism-slinging revert, I was agnostic.  And before that?  I was one of those other Catholics.  The catechism-optional, find-your-own-path types.

(Which is how I found my own path out of the Church — and later, following the same method, found my way back in.)

So, to answer Anna’s question . . .  What was it that made me, in 1991, a Georgetown kinda Catholic?  (At heart, if not in wallet.)  Thinking through it, my response is very simple: It was the religion I’d been taught my whole life.

My parents were both Catholic, but we barely went to church when I was little.  After I received my first holy communion at age 7, we quit attending Mass or CCD.  It was one of those parishes where they didn’t do confession until later, so I spent the next decade receiving communion, but never going to confession, or even knowing anything about that sacrament, except what I saw in movies.

Every year at Easter, my mom would say, “And we’re going to start going back to Mass every Sunday from now on,” and every year we wouldn’t.  But she didn’t give up.  In 1988 we moved from metro DC to a small Bible-belt town, and my mom argued it was social necessity for us to turn out a church every Sunday.   She was 50% southerner by birth, which gave her some authority as an expert on these matters, and plus you could count the baptist churches and know she was right.  We went to Mass.

It was kinda fun, after I got over my snotty teenage attitude.  Being Catholic in a baptist-methodist town was countercultural. In your face. Also I loved the God part.

We didn’t do anything crazy though, like praying at home, or reading the Scriptures, nothing Bible-Thumper like that.  We read the same newspapers — Wall Street Journal, the local paper, the diocesan paper.  We watched the same TV shows — heavy on the MTV during the day, sitcoms at night.  My sisters and I read good wholesome magazines for teen girls, like YM and Elle.  I thought the USCCB’s movie reviews were awfully uptight — I just ignored them.  If someone suggested maybe certain music wasn’t so edifying, I would have scoffed.  Paranoid types.  Throwbacks.  Idiots.

Our parish did offer Catholic sex ed, and we attended, but we also did secular sex ed — both at school and via everything we read and watched and listened to.  My parents no doubt wished they could instill a few Catholic moral values in that department, but they had no notion that it was possible — not even, perhaps, entirely convinced it was necessary.  One evening our Catholic youth leader did a presentation about Catholic teaching on sex.  Birth control wasn’t a topic — neither for nor against.  I raised my hand and asked her this: What if two people had promised to marry each other, and they were faithful and they really were going to get married and stay faithful — would it matter if they had sex before hand?

She was literally stumped.  Unable to say it was wrong.  Unable.

After all, she’d been raised in the same religion as me — the religion of the popular media and public schools and rosy planned parenthood commercials.  This was the faith of our nation.  Our religion was Modern American, flavored Catholic.

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Why be a Catholic-favored American?  Well, for one thing it’s a beautiful faith.  The liturgy, the art — we had a gorgeous parish church, wonderful musicians.  There’s the sense of history.  There’s the McDonald’s factor, too — when you travel, you always have a place to fit in.   And just as I’d proudly say I was part-Irish or part-German, it was a pleasure to have a Catholic identity.  I expect I would have made just as fervent a modern American progressive-Muslim or progressive-Jew.  It’s a heritage.  You love your heritage the way you love your grandma, even if she does sometimes let slip a racist remark, and you know your better, but you never say anything because she’s your grandma.

And here’s the other thing, and this is the truth about many good Americans, whether pagan-flavor or Catholic-flavor or gay-flavor or you name it:  Nice people.  Kind people.  People who do good things for others.  People who try their best to be the best person they can be.  Faithful catechism-reading Catholics don’t have the corner on the Niceness market.   Nice is universal.

So why stick around a Church that I thought was wrong?  Well in the long run I didn’t, but my departure had more to do with being out of town on the weekends and falling in with non-religious friends than it did with an active dissent from the Church.   So what kept me claiming the name of Catholic for many years, until I finally gave up on the Christian thing altogether?

  • There’s God.  Humans are spiritual.  We don’t walk away from God easily.
  • There really wasn’t any conflict.

Oh, sure, you sometimes maybe heard or read some Catholic thing that you disagreed with.  But when find-your-own-path religion is the voice of the entire wider culture, and a prominent voice within the Church?  You go with it.

And that’s it.  I left for college (State U, no money for Georgetown) an exuberant, rosary-praying, sometimes-Bible-reading Catholic teen, but one who had no serious Christian discipleship, no serious training in the faith, and not a single voice pointing to a faith that was something other than American Mainstream Culture with incense and candles attached.   State U did the rest of the work  to finish off that remnant of a faith.

And interestingly, it was  the hardcore, this-is-not-mere-culture,  Do You Accept Jesus as Your Lord and Savior evangelicals who both cemented my final separation with Christianity . . . and brought me back into the fold. Whence a baptist deacon unwittingly plopped me down at Mass on a Wednesday morning in 1999.  And with a little help from  Jack T. Chick, I stayed.  And started doing what the Catechism said.

Book Review: Eric Sammons’ Holiness for Everyone

Eric Sammons sent me a pdf review copy of his new book, Holiness for Everyone: The Practical Spirituality of St. Josemaria Escriva, not because we’ve ever met or even know each other on the internet, but, I gather, because I really liked his first book, Who is Jesus Christ?  (Which I wholeheartedly recommend.) He’s smart that way.  I like this one too.

What is isn’t:  We have to start here, because it’s easy to guess wrong.

  1. Eric Sammons is not a member of Opus Dei, and this is not a how-to book on being a member of that organization, nor an account of that group’s history.  Opus Dei barely gets mention, other than to recommend two reliable books on the topic.
  2. This is not a colorful anecdote-laden biography of St. Josemaria.  The chapter that tells his life focuses is on his spiritual development — the details that help you understand the saint’s approach to holiness for ordinary people.

What it is:

St. Josemaria Escriva is a 20th century saint whose spirituality is very much in line with St. Therese of Lisieux, whose Story of a Soul was a bestseller during his formative years, and  Blessed Theresa of Calcutta, who was his contemporary and likewise informed by the spirituality of St. Therese.  Basic Catholic practical holiness — what you see in the lives of every saint across all of history.

St. Josemaria’s particular charism was the insistence that saintliness is not for the vowed religious only — an error of his time, and still a struggle among Catholics today.  We tend today to either fall into the get-thee-to-a-nunnery trap, or just dismiss saintliness as something that hardly matters anyhow.  St. Josemaria’s contention, and Eric Sammons’ as well, is that it is possible for you and I to actually be holy.  And that there are specific steps we can take to cooperate with God’s grace in working towards that goal.

As with Who is Jesus Christ, Sammons’ text is packed with information and insight, but still approachable for the average reader.   It covers similar territory as Christian Self-Mastery, but far more readable than that classic.  I personally found every chapter to be helpful for me — life-changing, even.

Who would enjoy it?  I’d recommend this for older teens and adults who want to be challenged with practical ways to grow in the Christian life.  This is not mere inspiration: expect to be pushed to make specific resolutions about your prayer life and penitential practices.  There are discussion questions at the end of every chapter, making this a great book club choice.

This would make an excellent post-confirmation course for 11th and 12th graders — either taught in a high school religion class, or as a parent-teen book study.  (Also think: Post-RCIA discipleship group.) Because the text ties to free, online additional reading (Escriva, assorted Encyclicals), it would be easy to make a rounded-out senior-high religion curriculum using this book.

This is an ideal introduction to the writings of St. Josemaria Escriva.  I picked up a (print) copy of The Way while I was reading this book, and coming to it already well-versed with how Catholic spiritual training works, I find The Way to be awesome.  I’m thrilled to have been pointed in that direction.  But I’d caution you: Do not read The Way without first reading Sammons’ book or some other similar work.  Taken out of context, St. Josemaria’s collected comments are a recipe for scruples, misunderstanding, and stomping off in a fit of exasperation or despair.  Combined with a healthy, balanced view of Christian spirituality, enlightened by a work like Sammons’, The Way becomes the perfect ’round-the-house spiritual cattle-prod  — think Imitation of Christ, Football Coach Version.

Conclusion: Highly Recommended for Catholics for ready to grow in their spiritual life, and looking for an approachable, step-by-step walk through how to go about it.