This work covers critical issues facing the Catholic Church in the USA by drawing from the four goals of the colloquia, to identify, assess, and critique the distinctive elements in Catholicism's approach to civic life, and to generate recommendations for strengthening Catholic civic engagement.

Sheed & Ward proudly presents the first of two volumes in a groundbreaking series called American Catholics in the Public Square. The result of a three-year study sponsored by Pew aimed at understanding the contributions to U.S. civic life of the Catholic, Jewish, mainline and evangelical Protestant, African-American, Latino, and Muslim communities in the United States, the two volumes in this series gather selected essays from the Commonweal Colloquia and the joint meetings organized by the Commonweal Foundation and The Faith and Reason Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.