{"id":1860,"date":"2007-05-01T14:45:17","date_gmt":"2007-05-01T14:45:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/05\/eh.html"},"modified":"2007-05-01T14:45:17","modified_gmt":"2007-05-01T14:45:17","slug":"eh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/05\/eh.html","title":{"rendered":"Eh"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was originally excited to see notice of this book: The Roman Catholic Church: A History by <\/a>Edward Norman. A coffee-table style, richly illustrated history of the Church was badly needed, I thought. Well – it still is.<\/p>\n

\"Rchchurch\"<\/a> Oh, the images are nice, but the important part – the text – leaves much to be desired. Of course the Catholic Church is a rather large entity with a zillion facets that you could attempt to cover in a history, with no success, especially in just one volume. But this book – well, it’s hard to say exactly what it is a history of<\/em>. In a way, it’s primarily a history of the papacy, but it’s even incomplete in that respect. It seems to be fundamentally about the institutional church’s relationship to the secular world. I guess that’s it.<\/p>\n

So there is no – absolutely no- treatment of the development of sacraments, including the Mass. Just the minimal on spirituality – from the original monastics over to mendicants, etc. Doesn’t cover the Gospels, Paul much at all – just sort of jumps into Rome. <\/p>\n

Nice images, but not a very helpful text, sad to say, even as a quick overview, since so many important elements of church life aren’t even mentioned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was originally excited to see notice of this book: The Roman Catholic Church: A History by Edward Norman. A coffee-table style, richly illustrated history of the Church was badly needed, I thought. Well – it still is. Oh, the images are nice, but the important part – the text – leaves much to be…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nEh - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/05\/eh.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Eh - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I was originally excited to see notice of this book: The Roman Catholic Church: A History by Edward Norman. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1860\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}