MTSM Hosts Launch Event for Dr. Craycraft Book
04.17.24
Mount St. Mary’s Seminary & School of Theology (MTSM) celebrated the publication of Dr. Kenneth Craycraft’s latest book, Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America, at an event Tuesday evening (April 16) in the Bartlett Center on the MTSM campus.
“Too often, our politics have begun to inform our moral lives,” Dr. Craycraft, the James J. Gardner Family Chair of Moral Theology and Professor of Moral Theology at MTSM said. “Catholics not only have difficulty speaking to the public in a distinctively Catholic method, but to each other.”
Among those in attendance was Scott Richert, the Publisher for Our Sunday Visitor and someone who was very important to helping bring the book to realization.
“This was the book I have always wanted Our Sunday Visitor to publish,” Richert said prior to Dr. Craycraft’s presentation. “I thought I’d be the guy to one day write that book, but then Ken helped bring this to life. Writing a book like this in a presidential election year is unenviable, but I believe it is an important book for Catholics to read.”
Dr. Craycraft read excerpts from the book and discussed some of the motivations for writing the book and what he wanted people to get out of it.
“The effort is worth the hope,” Dr. Craycraft concluded.
Citizens Yet Strangers resets the framework of how we engage with politics as Catholics. Dr. Craycraft explains how Catholic theology transcends partisan politics, and he challenges Catholics to move away from the individualist liberal impulses of American political identity, whether on the left or the right. Avoiding the common clichés that prevent us from examining the role our faith should play in our public actions, this book dives deeper into the very way we orient our moral and political lives.
Citizens Yet Strangers is published by Our Sunday Visitor Publishing and was released on March 11 and can also be bought online here.