The Catholic Catalogue: A Field Guide to the Daily Acts That Make Up a Catholic Life

Description

Now in paperback. In this collection of recipes, devotionals, crafts, and practical ideas for celebrating the feast days, this popular Catholic mother-daughter team helps readers to discover, rediscover, and embrace some of the smells and tastes, sounds and sensations, and holidays of their faith. This beautifully designed book will help readers celebrate Catholicism throughout the years, across daily practice and milestones. Like the most useful field guides, it is divided into user-friendly sections, covering such topics as the veneration of relics, blessing your house, discovering a vocation, raising teenagers, getting a Catholic tattoo, brewing abbey ale, finding a spiritual director, and finding your own way in the tradition. With more than 75 inspiring chapters, this book promises to be a resource that individuals and families will turn to again and again.

MELISSA MUSICK is a columnist for National Catholic Reporter and Celebration. She is the author of eight books on religion and spirituality. Her essays have appeared in First Things, Commonweal, GIA, Notre Dame Magazine, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, and Give Us This Day. She studied at Grinnell College and St. Thomas Seminary, and was a college chaplain for nine years. ANNA KEATING is a freelance writer and former high school teacher. Her essays have appeared in First Things, Salon, America, Notre Dame Magazine, Commonweal, the Denver Post, Altcatholicah, and elsewhere. She graduated from Notre Dame and co-owns and lives above Keating Woodworks, a handmade-furniture studio.

"From St. Polycarp's martyrdom to prayerful room blessings, The Catholic Catalogue offers a smart, modern look at the varied aspects of our faith tradition. Through personal stories and well-researched history, Musick and Keating not only describe the building blocks for a Catholic household, but demonstrate why, for so many, the Catholic Church feels like home." -Kerry Weber, managing editor for America, and author of Mercy in the City "Putting the richness of Catholic liturgy and life on full display, Melissa Musick and Anna Keating show us that Christianity is constituted by keeping habits, performing practices, and embodying the traditions of the church. This book will be useful to Catholics, indeed to all Christians, looking for ways to make their faith practical. At one point, this remarkable mother-and-daughter team quote Thomas Aquinas who reminds us, 'The things we love tell us what we are.' The Catholic Catalogue instructs us in the virtue of love and thus helps to make us what we are called to be: disciples." -Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School "Honest, graceful, wry, informative, wonderfully unegotistically erudite, and a startling pleasure to read. Also a long inky lovely prayer of celebration and love and reverence and delight in Catholicism as a verb, seems to me."-Brian Doyle, author of Grace Notes and How the Light Gets In "It is written that faith without works is dead; one could not ask for a better guide to a lively life of faith. The Catholic Catalogue offers ritual recipes for the everyday and extraordinary moments alike; presenting often-neglected wonders from two thousand years of tradition in precisely the form we need them today. Every domestic church should have one." -Nathan Schneider, author of God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to The Internet