Based on the author’s extensive interviews with hundreds of Catholics of every stripe, from various parishes in the San Francisco Bay area, this book paints a clear and sometimes complex portrait of what it is like to be Catholic in America today. Baggett, an associate professor of religion and society at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, acknowledges that his interviewees “model the very sort of open conversation about faith, doubt, and religious community that is too often lacking in the current discourse….” One can rightly describe the book as “a conversation piece.”
The perspectives of Catholics on such areas as rooting/uprooting, authority, belonging, tradition in a post-traditional society reflect a culturally rich and diverse population who, as the book reveals, may practice faith differently than generations earlier but who are no “hardly less religious.”
Look for a full-length review of Sense of the Faithful in the Feb. 2 issue of America. Anyone wanting to know what Catholics are thinking—and, even better, listen to what they are saying—should read this book.
Purchase Sense of the Faithful: How American Catholics Live Their Faith
This article appears in January 19 2009.
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