Book Review: Looking at the World With Courage to Look First at Christ, by Dr. Jeff Mirus

By Dr. Jeff Mirus , Catholic Culture, May 10, 2023

Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic Internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org.

This is a very significant revision of a book review I posted yesterday under a very different title. In my haste, I misunderstood a critical point. I correct that mistake here as a matter of duty…and pleasure. The URL of the original review, should it appear in search engines or personal links, now redirects readers to this corrected version.

A fascinating new book from Ignatius Press invites both comment and praise: Confession of a Catholic Worker. Larry S. Chapp, a former professor of Catholic theology who came to the fulness of faith in the Catholic Worker movement, offers a unique perspective on the spiritual landscape today, with plenty of good ideas about what it means to be a truly cruciform Catholic. After all, there shouldn’t be any other kind. What makes the book so interesting is his exploration of the possibilities in light of what we often call the left-right dialectic which, arising from secular culture, still afflicts the Church in the forms of Traditionalism and Modernism.

Now wait, you may say: In what sense is it possible to equate Traditionalism and Modernism as legitimate poles of Catholic thought? Traditionalism is ultimately rooted in Catholicism; Modernism is ultimately rooted in secularism. Aren’t these unequal distortions? As it turns out, Chapp thinks so too, though he isn’t quite as straightforward about it. …

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