Mary, Star of Evangelization: Tilling the Soil and Sowing the Seed

How should we conduct the "New Evangelization"? The imperative to proclaim and bear witness to the Catholic faith is widely recognized among the faithful, but many evangelizers or potential evangelizers still find themselves faced with this question. When should an evangelizer question and challenge cultural norms and practices, and when should he or she work with elements of a certain cultural setting in order to make the faith compelling to others? Mary, Star of Evangelization sheds new light on these questions by approaching them through the figure of the Virgin Mary: "Star of the new evangelization." Mary is shown in this book to offer a lens through whom different forms of evangelization take shape. On the one hand, the approach of building on a host culture for evangelization is presented as tilling the soil: cultivating the conditions that might enable an appropriate response from others to the invitation of faith. Yet Mary is also shown here as a figure in whom evangelization takes shape through challenging dominant cultural norms by sowing the seed of authentic Catholic teaching. Through a close reading of the theologies of culture at work in Pedro Arrupe, SJ, Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dorothy Day, and John Henry Newman, this book not only outlines the theories behind key strategies for conducting the New Evangelization in considerable depth and detail, but reveals the fundamentally Marian texture which they share, so the hitherto untapped resources of the title of Mary as "Star of the New Evangelization" are brought vividly to light in new and unexpected ways.