American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow: Building Churches for the Future, 1925–1975, by Catherine R. Osborne (Book Review)
Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
Fall 2019
Abstract
Catherine Osborne's American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow historicizes one of the most dramatic changes of the U.S. Catholic Church in the late twentieth century: the movement away from medieval-inspired churches to shopping mall chapels, churches with ecumenical spaces, and floating congregations. And yet as Osborne shows, this movement away from medieval architecture was also about new theology. Catholic modernists "claimed the future of churches as vital to a renewed ecclesiology (or theory about the nature of the Church), and as critically connected to a renewed eschatology (the theology of the redemption of creation)" (4). Through an analysis of buildings and architectural plans as well as through the voices of those people who imagined, built, and used these spaces, Osborne argues that how American Catholics imagined their churches intersected with how they envisioned the future.
Recommended Citation
Plummer, J. (2019). [Review of the book American Catholics and the church of tomorrow: Building churches for the Future, 1925–1975, by C. R. Osborne]. U.S. Catholic Historian, 37(4), 97-99. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/741550
Comments
Book review of American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow: Building Churches for the Future, 1925–1975, by Catherine R. Osborne.