Leaving Christendom for Good

Church-World Dialogue in a Secular Age

By (author) James Gerard McEvoy

Paperback - £40.00

Publication date:

15 April 2016

Length of book:

230 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739194324

Leaving Christendom for Good argues that the solution to some of the most troubling tensions in the life of the Catholic Church since Vatican II can be found in the council’s document Gaudium et spes. This text’s view of the church’s mission and social relationships as dialogical has the capacity to liberate. Part One studies the contemporary place of religion—with particular reference to Charles Taylor’s groundbreaking work, A Secular Age—and examines Gaudium et spes’s dialogical view of the church-world relationship. Part Two explores what true dialogue entails and how it is best understood theologically, engaging critically with Joseph Ratzinger’s view of the church-world relationship. The book’s final chapter considers two practical implications of its argument: how evangelization can be best understood today, and how the church can best approach issues in the public sphere.
James McEvoy presents a timely and interesting look at the stance of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church towards the modern world. . . .The work could appeal to a wide audience: Catholics and other laypeople disenchanted with the unhelpful dead-end of the modern liberal-conservative dichotomy (which McEvoy criticizes); Christian clergy interested in the ecclesiological ebb-and-flow of Christianity’s largest body; and those interested in the discussions around the work of Charles Taylor. . . .Leaving Christendom for Good is a helpful work that engages several important currents of thought and their representative thinkers, and ends with a reasonable diagnosis for a way forward that could appeal to wide sections of the modern Catholic Church and many sympathetic onlookers, Christian and secular. . . .[O]ne of McEvoy’s chief strengths is a deft ability to summarize and synthesize vast amounts of scholarship, while threading through his commentary and expounding a clear thesis. . . .[the book's] prescient reflections on modernity, evangelization, and the courage of belief today has many key pieces in place for later expansion by himself or others of what a dialogical model could mean for Catholicism in the twenty-first century.