{"id":4444,"date":"2005-08-04T22:16:33","date_gmt":"2005-08-04T22:16:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/08\/lovely.html"},"modified":"2005-08-04T22:16:33","modified_gmt":"2005-08-04T22:16:33","slug":"lovely","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/08\/lovely.html","title":{"rendered":"Lovely…"},"content":{"rendered":"

In America, church historian John Jay Hughes review two of the new B16 books – Allen’s on the election, and Robert Moynihan’s intro to the Pope.<\/a> It’s only available to subscribers, but it’s a favorable review (and I’ve read the Allen book – it is<\/em> very good). A couple of nice passages:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

I experienced Joseph Ratzinger\u2019s rhetorical gifts myself 40 years ago. His lectures at the University of M\u00fcnster attracted not only students but people from the town, who came to hear him at 8:15 a.m. before going to work. After every lecture one wanted to go into a church and pray. A regular attendant at the lectures was a Protestant student from South Africa. The Catholic students predicted his imminent conversion: \u201cBei Ratzinger f\u00e4llt der st\u00e4rkste Mann um<\/em>\u201d (\u201cFacing Ratzinger the strongest man falls over.\u201d) Though intended as a jest, the remark was not so wide of the mark. Decades later the journalist Peter Seewald, whose interviews with Cardinal Ratzinger led to the books Salt of the Earth<\/em> and God and the World<\/em>, returned to the practice of the faith as a result of his conversations with the cardinal. <\/p>\n

[snip]<\/p>\n

The pope,\u201d Allen writes, \u201crealizes that people are not convinced of the Christian message on the basis of doctrinal debates. They want to see that Christianity is a joyful thing, a source of life and hope, that it lights fires of love and self-sacrifice.\u201d And in the 1985 interview which became The Ratzinger Report<\/em> he said: \u201cThe only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely: the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.\u201d Need we look further for an explanation of the optimism that pervades both of these modest books?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In America, church historian John Jay Hughes review two of the new B16 books – Allen’s on the election, and Robert Moynihan’s intro to the Pope. It’s only available to subscribers, but it’s a favorable review (and I’ve read the Allen book – it is very good). A couple of nice passages: I experienced Joseph…<\/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-4444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nLovely... - 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\/2005\/08\/lovely.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lovely... - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In America, church historian John Jay Hughes review two of the new B16 books – Allen’s on the election, and Robert Moynihan’s intro to the Pope. 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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\/4444","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=4444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}