Every traditional creed offers not only its special consolations but also its particular struggle. For Buddhists, it's the transcendence of dualism in a world of experience that seems everywhere divided. For Jews, there is the continuing renewal of meaning to be wrestled from the sacred texts. For Catholics there is the institutional church.
James Carroll is a prolific poet, playwright, novelist, nonfiction writer and newspaper columnist. "Practicing Catholic" is a memoir -- historic, spiritual and aesthetic -- that recounts his personal progress from a devout Roman Catholic boyhood in the years before the Second Vatican Council, through the seminary and his ordination as a priest of the Paulist order and ultimately his leaving that vocation to become a full-time writer. In the process, he also became a vocal critic of the institutionalized church (particularly what he aptly calls its "absolutist" approach to sexual ethics), its handling of the clerical pedophile scandal and, more recently, authoritarian back- sliding on the conciliar re- forms.
