Anyone else see this crap? The idiot throws in every manner of cook nutter, plus Trads, plus conservatives, into a big miss-mash and then condemns them all. Akk under the guise of "sociology" to cloak his prejudices in the legitimacy of "science". In saner times this book would have been prevented from being published.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801862655/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0801862655&linkCode=as2&tag=httpwwwchanco-20The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism is a crisp, witty, thorough, and fresh study of the inner workings of the Catholic right. Sociologist Michael W. Cuneo concentrates on three groups: anti-abortion activists, Catholic separatists (who believe that the American Church revoked its authority regarding true Catholicism by distorting the intentions of Vatican II), and mystics and apocalypticists. As Cuneo explains, these groups believe that "the Catholic church in the United States has strip-malled its liturgical life, compromised its doctrine, and squandered its moral capital. Once defiant and blessedly haughty, the church is now a cheap floozy, cozying up to the modern world, smiling, winking, desperate for flattery and approval." In analyzing each of these groups and their distinctive methods of protest against the purported corruption of the American Church, Cunea provides fascinating anecdotes based on wide reading and firsthand encounters. All of them, it seems, pose variations of one essential question--and it is surely one of the most vexing questions at this point in American Christian history: what, exactly, constitutes an ultimate authority worth trusting? --Michael Joseph Gross
From Library Journal
Based on his personal interviews and visitations to communities in the United States and Canada, Cuneo's (sociology, Fordham Univ.) book docuмents and evaluates the reasons behind post-Vatican II, disaffected Catholic groups, from moderate to extreme. He divides these factions into conservatives (those mostly remaining within the church), separatists (those disaffiliated from Rome), and marianists (those primarily focused on Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and on doomsday predictions). Intellectuals, eccentrics, and schismatics also pass through these pages. Cuneo covers lesser-known groups, such as the Canadian Apostles of Divine Love, and the more recognized traditionalists such as Gomar DePauw, Marcel Lefebvre, and marianist Virginia Leukens. More journalistic in style but topically similar to Patrick Allitt's Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America (LJ 12/93), this study will be useful especially for academic religion, history, and sociology collections.?Anna M. Donnelly, St. John's Univ. Lib., Jamaica, N.Y.