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Three Dominicans priests tell thier story in a book by Colleen Carroll.
Review: The New Faithful Jim Bowman The New Faithful: Why Young Adults are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy, by Colleen Carroll, Loyola Press, 320 pp.
If you like newspaper feature stories, you will love this book. It applies the formula expertly: general statement, plus survey or on-scene expert remarks, plus interview quotes. Do it over and over, and you repeatedly connect the lines for the distracted reader. So doggedly does Colleen Carroll do this that the reader of this book, even when distracted further by this stop-and-go writing itself, nonetheless gets the point: The young are in rebellion again against their elders — and again in the cause of freedom, novelty, and cutting-edge activities leading, with a little luck, to societal upheaval. Right the first part, but not about freedom, except from libertinism, or novelty or upheaval. They rebel against elders, all right, but not in that same old liberal direction. Instead, they are embracing tradition and the traditional, turning from what their mamas and papas do and think or at least from what the young did and thought when their mamas and papas were young.
They are The New Faithful, and Carroll, 28 years young — twentysomething, she would say — has their number. She has traveled from New York to California, border to border, in search of people her age or thereabouts, mostly Roman Catholics, who have dug in their heels in the face of the liberal juggernaut and dug in for the long haul as committed Christians who won’t say no.
There are the three Dominican brothers, priests to be, draped in white, bearing “easy smiles and the confident air of natural-born leaders . . . tall . . . and handsome,” at the Washington, D.C., House of Studies. One of them “took a trip to Israel and felt the tug of radical commitment.” Another realized God was his “top priority.” His conversion changed his life, making him “so much happier.”
