American Catholics and Civic Engagement: A Distinctive Voice : American Catholics in the Public Square

Sheed & Ward proudly presents the first of two volumes in a groundbreaking series called American Catholics in the Public Square. The result of a three-year study sponsored by Pew aimed at understanding the contributions to U.S. civic life of the Catholic, Jewish, mainline and evangelical Protestant, African-American, Latino, and Muslim communities in the United States, the two volumes in this series gather selected essays from the Commonweal Colloquia and the joint meetings organized by the Commonweal Foundation and The Faith and Reason Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

Margaret O’Brien Steinfels served as Commonweal’s editor from 1988 to 2002 and as co-director of American Catholics in the Public Square project. Peter Steinfels writes the ’Beliefs’ column for the New York Times and is the author of A People Adrift: The Crisis of Roman Catholicism in America (2003).