The Association of Catholic Publishers has just announced their winners and I’m thrilled to share that Cultural Catholics earned 2nd place in the “Resources for Ministry” category!

Also, my thanks to Noah Banasiewicz, S.J. of America magazine for his strong review of Cultural Catholics! He really touched on some of the key insights of the book in a way that can help potential readers imagine how they might use the findings to better connect with Catholics who attend Mass infrequently. I’ll offer the closing paragraph of the review here:

As a scholar who researches evangelization and seeks to identify how the church can better reach those beyond our pews, I struggle to find thinkers who propose pathways forward that are both practically sound and spiritually rich. Cultural Catholics embodies both of these needs and is a resource from which any diocese, campus ministry or scholar engaged in this work would benefit. Day is neither blindly optimistic nor despairing; rather, she charts a way ahead fitting for this Jubilee Year, undergirded by authentic, ambitious hope.

Finally, I had a delightful conversation with journalist Luka Tripalo of Glas Koncila, Croatia’s largest Catholic weekly. We discussed the book’s implications for Catholic life beyond the United States and also ventured into a few other areas of Church life; it was great to do some cross-cultural comparisons. Our conversation reveals that cultural Catholicism is definitely not just an “American thing,” and so the book offers some opportunities for other countries to think creatively about engaging these Catholics. Tripalo did a great job of distilling our 1+ hour conversation into a tidy, interview-style article. You can read the article, “U.S. Expert on Cultural Catholics Maureen K. Day: Parishes Can Bring Believers Back to Church — Christmas Liturgy Should Be Planned as Early as August,” in English or in Croatian. Tripalo sets the stage of our conversation with the following:

It is therefore refreshing when someone approaches this issue [infrequent Mass attendance] not only from the angle of pastoral activism, but also with academic rigor. Both perspectives—pastoral and scholarly—are united in the recently published book by American Catholic theologian and sociologist Dr. Maureen K. Day, titled Cultural Catholics: Who They Are, How to Respond, published by Liturgical Press. In our conversation with the award-winning author and researcher, we discussed not only the phenomenon of cultural Catholicism, but also the challenges of Catholic social engagement and the potential for reimagining the current model of parish pastoral care.