A Well-Built Faith

I’m excited and proud to tell you about my upcoming book, A Well-Built Faith: A Catholic’s Guide to Knowing and Sharing What We Believe, to be published by Loyola Press (available late this summer).

Here’s how I describe the purpose/goal of the book in the Introduction:

We Catholics seek to be people who have the right tools and a firm foundation to serve God and others. How do we do this? Through faith formation. Catechesis is the process through which we become equipped with the right tools and a firm foundation to live out our baptism. This is a process that is never finished – it is ongoing and lifelong. We all need to start somewhere. That’s where A Well-Built Faith: A Catholic’s Guide to Knowing and Sharing What We Believe comes in. This book is designed to give you a firm foundation to get started in a lifelong process of developing a well-built faith. Whether you are a catechist, a liturgical minister, a parish pastoral council member, a catechumen or candidate in the RCIA, or an everyday Catholic trying to remain faithful to your baptismal call and grow closer to the Lord, A Well-Built Faith is designed for you, “so that the one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work.” (2Timothy 3:17)

A firm foundation provides support for that which is built upon it. In ancient times, pillars provided the support for mammoth structures that would otherwise collapse under the weight of tons of building materials. When it comes to our faith, the Catholic Church has arranged a vast array of doctrines and beliefs into a somewhat mammoth structure we know as The Catechism of the Catholic Church. This structure is supported by four pillars that provide a firm foundation for our faith:

 

1. The Creed
2. The Sacraments
3. The Moral Life
4. A Life of Prayer

This simple organization of over 2000 years of a living Tradition provides us with easy access to our faith. At the same time, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, at over 900 pages long, was not written with the average Catholic as its targeted reader. Rather, it was written as a reference book for bishops and for those who teach the Catholic faith. With that in mind, the bishops of the United States produced a more readable resource, the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults (USCCB, 2006) that follows the organization of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Even so, the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults weighs in at over 600 pages, still a daunting task for many readers. Catholics continue to ask for help in learning about their faith in a way that makes it accessible. With this book, A Well-Built Faith, help has arrived.

Over the next few weeks and months, I will “tease” you with snippets from the 18 chapters and will keep you up to date on when it will be available and how you can acquire copies.

Have a great weekend!

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