Sheed & Ward, in partnership with the Commonweal Foundation and with funding from the Pew Charitable Trust, proudly presents the first of two volumes in a groundbreaking series called American Catholics in the Public Square. The result of a three-year study sponsored by Pew aimed at understanding the contributions to U.S. civic life of the Catholic, Jewish, mainline and evangelical Protestant, African-American, Latino, and Muslim communities in the United States, the two volumes in this se...

As religiously grounded moral arguments have become ever more influential factors in the national debate-particularly reinforced by recent presidential elections and the creation of the faith-based initiative office in the White House-journalists' ignorance about theological convictions has often worked to distort the public discourse on important policy issues. Pope John Paul II's pronouncements on stem-cell research, the constitutional controversies regarding faith-based initiatives, the...

In 1979, Peter Steinfels identified a new movement and predicted it would be the decade’s most enduring legacy to American politics. In a new Introduction he describes its evolution from a reaction to Sixties' social change into an entrenched political force promoting an assertive, even belligerent, foreign policy.The Neoconservatives traced the origins and described the beliefs of a movement that had barely been labeled. Four decades later, the neoconserv...

Sheed & Ward, in partnership with Commonweal magazine, presents the second of two volumes in the groundbreaking series, American Catholics in the Public Square, a project funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Essays by scholars, journalists, lawyers, business and labor leaders, church administrators and lobbyists, novelists, activists, policy makers and politicians address the most critical issues facing the Catholic Church in the United States. Volume 2, American Catholics, American Cultur...

In A People Adrift, a prominent Catholic thinker states bluntly that the Catholic Church in the United States must transform itself or suffer irreversible decline. Peter Steinfels shows how even before the recent revelations about sexual abuse by priests, the explosive combination of generational change and the thinning ranks of priests and nuns was creating a grave crisis of leadership and identity.This groundbreaking book offers an analysis not just of the church's immed...

THE GOOD SOCIETY examines how many of our institutions- from the family to the government itself- fell from grace, and offers concrete proposals for revitalizing them.

This is a collection of fifteen provocative essays by a cadre of international authors that examine the nature and shape of the Communion today; the colonial legacy; economic tensions and international debt; sexuality and justice; the ecological crisis; violence and healing in South Africa; persecution and religious fundamentalism; the church amid global urbanization; and much more.

Every five hundred years, the church cleans out its attic and has a giant rummage sale. Well, not exactly. But according to Phyllis Tickle, this is an accurate summary of the church's massive transitions over time. According to the pattern, we are living in such a time of change right now. Tickle calls it "the Great Emergence"--a time of dizzying upheaval and hopeful promise during which various sectors of today's church swirl into a great confluence at the center.As an inte...

"Terrific . . . essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we arrived in the Trump era and where the Democrats go from here." —Fareed Zakaria, CNNFollowing the shocking results of the US election of 2016, public intellectuals across the globe offered theories and explanations, but few were met with such vitriol, panic, and debate as Mark Lilla's. The Once and Future Liberal is a passionate plea to liberals to turn from the divisive politics of...

Whatever else one might say about Emergence Christianity, says Phyllis Tickle, one must agree it is shifting and re-configuring itself in such a prodigious way as to defy any final assessments or absolute pronouncements. Yet the insightful and well-read Tickle offers us a dispatch from the field to keep us informed of where Emergence Christianity now stands, where it may be going, and how it is aligning itself with other parts of God's church. Through her careful study and culture-watching...

Late in life, William F. Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is "boring," said the founding father of the American right. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them? Tracing conservatism back to its ...

**A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER"Already the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade." —David BrooksIn this controversial bestseller, Rod Dreher calls on American Christians to prepare for the coming Dark Age by embracing an ancient Christian way of life.**From the inside, American churches have been hollowed out by the departure of young people and by an insipid pseudo–Christianity. From the outside, they are beset by challenges to reli...