{"id":6265,"date":"2005-06-23T23:42:34","date_gmt":"2005-06-23T23:42:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/good-thief.html"},"modified":"2005-06-23T23:42:34","modified_gmt":"2005-06-23T23:42:34","slug":"good-thief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/good-thief.html","title":{"rendered":"Good Thief"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m going to steal an idea, so here ya go.<\/p>\n

Some of you might know that Human Events <\/em>issued a list of 10 Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Century<\/a>, much discussed around various blogs. Jimmy Akin<\/a> was one of the Catholic bloggers who ran a thread on it.<\/p>\n

What I’m stealing is this blogger’s idea of a "bottom ten list" for the Church.<\/a> He’s (as far as I can tell) a convert from the Episcopal Church to Eastern Orthodoxy, and his list is rather Protestant-skewed. I don’t know if I can come up with 10, and I doubt I have enough energy to justify them at this time of night, but here goes. Oh, and mine’s going to be popular and pastorally-oriented, and not particularly scholarly. And in no particular order, either.<\/p>\n

1. Catholicism<\/em> by Richard McBrien. Good historical material, and useful for that, but definitely harmful in the way McBrien evaluates the material and the context in which he places it all – a big grab bag of Catholic Stuff, in which nothing is really more true than anything else. A great irony of Catholic Life in the 90’s was that the same people who hated, hated, hated and decried The Catechism of the Catholic Church<\/em> pushed Catholicism<\/em> on every would-be catechist and heck, Catholic, who came down the road. It wasn’t a catechetical compendium that was the issue – it was whose<\/em>. <\/p>\n

2. Christ Among Us<\/em> by Anthony Wilhelm. My primary, foundational text for all four years of Catholic high school, as it was for many of you, I imagine. Very much in the "Many Catholics believe" genre<\/em> of catechetical writing.<\/p>\n

3. Environment and Art in Catholic Worship   ‘<\/em>Nuf said about that around here.<\/p>\n

4. Human Sexuality <\/em>by the CTSA, edited by Anthony Kosnik<\/p>\n

5. The Sexual Celibate<\/em> by Daniel Goergen and The Wounded Healer<\/em> by Henri Nouwen. I have much admiration for Nouwen, but I am sorry to say that I think this book had seriously negative, completely unintended consequences for those engaged in ministry in this country, and combined with the impact of the first title….disaster.<\/p>\n

6. Sexism and God-Talk<\/em> by Rosemary Radford Reuther. I’m not ashamed to call myself a feminist (on my own terms), and I’m quite interested in issues related to women and religion (the subject of my MA thesis), and while interest in women’s issues and perpsectives have revealed much of importance, the whole direction taken by the early thinkers like Reuther ended up throwing things off track and wasted a whole lot of time and energy. IMHO.<\/p>\n

7. The Joshua <\/em>books by Joseph Girzone. In this review <\/a>, I relate asking Michael why he thought they were so popular. He said, "Because people don’t read the Gospels, that’s why." Why are they damaging? Because, in essence, they concretize the supposed opposition between spirituality and organized religion, in which the latter always comes out as the bad guy, made it immensely popular and beloved among ill-educated catechists of all ages.<\/p>\n

8. The Da Vinci Code. <\/em>Okay, I had to throw that in there. Even though I really don’t know if I’d put it on the list. Yeah, maybe I would.<\/p>\n

9. The works of Malachi Martin (Thanks to Tom for the suggestion)<\/a><\/p>\n

10…..You fill in the blank. And argue intensely about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m going to steal an idea, so here ya go. Some of you might know that Human Events issued a list of 10 Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Century, much discussed around various blogs. Jimmy Akin was one of the Catholic bloggers who ran a thread on it. What I’m stealing is…<\/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-6265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nGood Thief - 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\/06\/good-thief.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Good Thief - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’m going to steal an idea, so here ya go. 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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\/6265","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=6265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}