All Good Books Are Catholic Books

Una M. Cadegan shows how the Catholic Church’s official position on literary culture developed from World War I to Vatican II in 1965.

Una M. Cadegan is Associate Professor of History at the University of Dayton.

Trying to embrace the subject of American Catholic literary culture in the twentieth century can stretch a researcher to her fingertips. Una M. Cadegan shows her range in ably canvassing a broad swath of writers and critical commentators who left their mark between World War I and the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).

Matthew S. Hedstrom:

The clash of religious faith with Enlightenment thought is the great drama of modern Western intellectual history. Una M. Cadegan's All Good Books Are Catholic Books recounts a particularly fractious and fascinating moment in that epic saga, the struggle of American Catholics—lay and religious, faithful and lapsed—with modernity. In particular, Cadegan aims to demonstrate that 'literature and literary culture played a key role' in this encounter, allowing Catholics neither to acquiesce to nor fully resist the moral, cultural, and intellectual developments of the age, but rather accommodate them, ultimately, 'on their own terms.' Cadegan refreshingly refuses to cast the Roman Catholic Church as villain in a larger tale of intellectual and spiritual liberation. Cadegan makes revealing connections throughout between theology and other intellectual work. For those seeking to understand Catholic literary culture in the twentieth century, and the Catholic encounter with American modernity more broadly, there is no better place to start.

Arnold Sparr:

Cadegan adds to the body of recent scholarship that seeks to explain the complex relationship between American Catholicism and American intellectual culture in the years leading up to the Second Vatican Council.... This is a thought-provoking and inventive book.

Margaret McGuinness, Executive Director of the Office of Mission Integration and Professor of ReligionLa Salle University, author of Neighbors and Missionaries: A History of the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine and Called to Serve: A History of Nuns in America:

All Good Books Are Catholic Books is the go-to source for readers who wish to better understand the Catholic literary world between 1917 and 1966. Una M. Cadegan argues that twentieth-century U.S. Catholic literary culture both pushed the definition of literature toward the theological and moved beyond topics and texts considered explicitly Catholic. As the field of Catholic Studies continues to emerge and develop, Cadegan demonstrates the importance of including 'Catholic Books' in discussions related to the Catholic Intellectual Tradition.