Catholic League president Bill Donohue reviews Archbishop Charles Chaput’s new book, available as an e-book, A Heart on Fire: Catholic Witness and the Next America (it is available for 99 cents at Amazon and Barnes and Noble):
This is the right book by the right author at the right time. Archbishop Chaput calls our attention to the growing hostility to religion in public life. “In government, the media, academia, in the business community and in the wider culture,” he says, “many of our leaders no longer seem to regard religious faith as a healthy force.” Indeed, “The America emerging in the next several decades is likely to be much less friendly to Christian faith than anything in our country’s past.” He is particularly concerned about the way this “new orthodoxy” is impacting young people.
It would be wrong to conclude that Archbishop Chaput is demonizing the elites. No, there is a lot of blame to go around. “We can blame the mass media, or the academy, or science, or special-interest groups for creating the environment we now face,” he writes. “But we Christians—including we Catholics—helped shape it with our eagerness to fit in, our distractions and overconfidence, and our own lukewarm faith.”
The e-book, published by Image Books, a division of Random House, comes at a time when Catholics, and people of all faiths, are genuinely concerned about the way the Health and Human Services mandate will weaken our First Amendment right to religious liberty; it is the publishing house’s first e-book original. It also comes at a time when radical secularism has become increasingly aggressive in our culture.
Do yourself a favor and buy this book now: for the price of a half-cup of coffee, you can’t buy a better Easter gift.
