Christendom College history professor Dr. Christopher Shannon’s latest book, American Pilgrimage: A Historical Journey Through Catholic Life in a New World, is garnering critical acclaim. The book, which offers a new look at the history of the Catholic Church in the United States, has been featured in multiple interviews over the past two weeks, with Shannon speaking with Catholic World Report, EWTN, Relevant Radio, and others about the value of this new, scholarly work to readers today.
Shannon, who earned his Ph.D. from Yale, released his newest book this past June. The work distinguishes itself from countless other histories of the Church in the United States, which often suffer from an excess of either scholarly detachment or popular triumphalism. American Pilgrimage seeks instead to draw on the best of current scholarship to tell the story of the Church.
In an interview on The Cale Clark Show for Relevant Radio, Shannon spoke on various topics related to the book, including the difference between secular history and salvation history, arguing that the idea that one is based in reason and the other is based in faith is not accurate. For Shannon, the difference is not between faith and reason but instead the difference between different constellations of faith and reason.
“The secular historian proceeds from certain faith principles,” explains Shannon. “If you’re a humanist, you would write about what someone thinks about being human, apart from any kind of supernatural truth. If you believe that to be human is to be made in the image and likeness of God, then you cannot tell a human story apart from God. For Catholics, in the end, salvation history is simply human history. It’s not our particular, private story — it’s the story of mankind.”
According to Shannon, he strove to make this point through his work, presenting the story of the Church factually through its ups and downs in America, leading to where it stands today.
Current, an online journal, wrote that the book arrives “at a critical time for the Roman Catholic Church in the United States,” while The Catholic World Report published another extensive interview with Shannon. In it, Shannon made the point that the tremendous cultural influence of American Catholicism in the mid-twentieth century transitioning to a dramatic decline in influence over the past few decades “staggers the imagination.”
On the Kresta in the Afternoon show on EWTN, Kresta noted that Shannon’s work presents Catholic history in a hopeful manner, rather than the triumphalist presentation seen in other works of history. For Shannon, this was the ideal that he was striving for, offering an alternative to other existing histories of Catholicism in America.
“I wanted to present the best of scholarship in an accessible way for readers, but also in a way that is, while critical, ultimately sympathetic to the Church,” says Shannon.
Shannon is an associate professor of history at Christendom, teaching courses ranging from American Catholic History to Irish American History and the Medieval World. His books include Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in Modern American Social Thought (Johns Hopkins, 1996), Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classic Hollywood Cinema (University of Scranton Press, 2010), and with Christopher O. Blum, The Past as Pilgrimage: Narrative, Tradition and the Renewal of Catholic History (Christendom Press, 2014).
To order Shannon’s latest, visit here.