America's Church: The National Shrine and Catholic Presence in the Nation's Capital

America's Church: The National Shrine and Catholic Presence in the Nation's Capital by Tweed, Thomas A.. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780199782987.

The National Shrine in Washington, DC has been deeply loved, blithely ignored, and passionately criticized. It has been praised as a "dazzling jewel" and dismissed as a "towering Byzantine beach ball." In this intriguing and inventive book, Thomas Tweed shows that the Shrine is also an illuminating site from which to tell the story of twentieth-century Catholicism. He organizes his narrative around six themes that characterize U.S. Catholicism, and he ties these themes to the Shrines material culture--to images, artifacts, or devotional spaces.