Catholic Converts Contributor(s): Allitt, Patrick (Author) |
|
ISBN: 080142996X ISBN-13: 9780801429965 Publisher: Cornell University Press OUR PRICE: $80.55 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: June 1997 Annotation: 'An extremely valuable contribution, it makes clear--for the first time--how completely converts dominated the intellectual life of British and American Catholicism....Brisk and lively, eminently readable.' - Philip Gleason, University of Notre Dame |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - History | Modern - General - Religion | Christianity - History - Religion | Christian Living - General |
Dewey: 248.242 |
LCCN: 96029989 |
Lexile Measure: 1460 |
Physical Information: 1.13" H x 6.35" W x 9.26" (1.36 lbs) 360 pages |
Themes: - Theometrics - Academic - Religious Orientation - Catholic - Religious Orientation - Christian |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: From the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, an impressive group of English speaking intellectuals converted to Catholicism. Outspoken and gifted, they intended to show the fallacies of religious skeptics and place Catholicism, once again, at the center of western intellectual life. The lives of individual converts--such as John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day--have been well documented, but Patrick Allitt has written the first account of converts' collective impact on Catholic intellectual life. His book is also the first to characterize the distinctive style of Catholicism they helped to create and the first to investigate the extensive contacts among Catholic convert writers in the United States and Britain.Allitt explains how, despite the Church's dogmatic style and hierarchical structure, converts working in the areas of history, science, literature, and philosophy maintained that Catholicism was intellectually liberating. British and American converts followed each other's progress closely, visiting each other and sending work back and forth across the Atlantic. The outcome of their labors was not what the converts had hoped. Although they influenced the Catholic Church for three or four generations, they were unable to restore it to the central place in Western intellectual life that it had enjoyed before the Reformation. |
Contributor Bio(s): Allitt, Patrick: - Patrick Allitt is Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University. He is the author of Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-1985 and Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome, both from Cornell University Press. |