Sundays in America: A Yearlong Road Trip

It's a fascinating project: attend 52 different churches in one year and report your first impressions. Shea, a New England novelist and former Catholic, engagingly writes of her initial visits to all kinds of churches: Shaker and Baptist, evangelical and mainline, African-American and Caucasian. Sometimes, these well-written first impressions yield intriguing analysis, as when she notes the total absence of children at the Mother Church of Christ, Scientist. But more often, the book's quick verdicts reinforce the idea that public Sunday worship is just one part of what makes a religion tick, and that it may be unfair to judge churches solely on this basis. Shea seems comfortable enough criticizing other people's intolerance

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