How to Defend the Faith without Raising Your Voice: Civil Responses to Catholic Hot Button Issues

It is about winning friends, not arguments. It is about shedding light, not heat. It's about reframing the argument so hearts can be opened and minds can be inspired.

How to Defend the Faith without Raising Your Voice is a new sort of apologetics. It is for those moments when you are thrust into the spotlight as the token Catholic whether the spotlight is simply at the office water cooler or whether it is front and center at the in-laws Thanksgiving celebration. How to Defend the Faith without Raising Your Voice gives Catholics a fresh way of explaining the Church's teaching on contentious issues humanly, compellingly, and succinctly.

But this book does not pretend to suggest it is as simple as memorizing a speech. Every conversation is different. Every day's news cycle will bring new arguments and new challenges. Instead, it is a book about what the issues really are and where the criticisms are coming from so you can understand and communicate effectively.

It is the fruit of a group of speakers and experts brought together by a single idea: to make sure that Catholics and the Church were represented properly in the media when Pope Benedict came to visit the UK in 2010. Their original and thoughtful approach helped make that visit a triumph and now it can be expanded for a much broader use.

Whether read in groups or alone, studied in schools or parishes, How to Defend the Faith without Raising Your Voice offers the same thorough briefings on hot topics and the same top tips for effective communication which helped make the project such a success.

Austen Ivereigh is a British writer, journalist, and commentator on religious and political affairs who holds a PhD from Oxford University. His work appears regularly in the Jesuit magazine "America" and in many other periodicals. He is well known on British media, especially on the BBC, Sky, ITV and Al-Jazeera, as a Catholic commentator.

John Norton moved to San Francisco in 1974 and soon afterwards joined the Saturday Writing Workshop at Small Press Traffic. His poetry and fiction began to appear in small magazines and literary journals. A previous book of prose poems and sketches won an American Book Award. He's served on the boards of Small Press Traffic and the Irish Arts Foundation, and for many years helped organize the Irish-American Crossroads Festival. He works as a technical writer and editor in Silicon Valley.