SUPERMARKET SERMONS: Notes on Beauty, Grace and the Wisdom of Popular Religion

SUPERMARKET SERMONS: Notes on Beauty, Grace and the Wisdom of Popular Religion

Supermarket Sermons is a collection of essays on God’s involvement in the circumstances of modern men and women drawn primarily from the popular “Senior Spirituality” column written by Michael E. DeSanctis, Ph.D., a layman, for an informational tabloid distributed at grocery stores and other commercial venues throughout the tri-state area of Northwestern Pennsylvania, Northwestern New York and Northeastern Ohio. The essays build upon DeSanctis’s decades-long career as a professor of both fine arts and theology at Gannon University, a Catholic, diocesan institution with campuses in Erie, Pennsylvania, and Ruskin, Florida, along with his service as a liturgical designer, consultant and educator to religious communities internationally involved in the construction or renovation of settings for worship. The book is mostly free of technical language and presented in a style bound to attract readers of all kinds open to wrestling with the big, God-centered questions that have intrigued theologians and others for centuries. A consistent theme of Supermarket Sermons is that popular religion persists in our so-called “secular age” and is reconciled with advances in modern science more easily than some might imagine. The book’s contents are grouped into sections entitled “Growing Old and Growing Wise,” “Theologizing Beyond the Realm of Theologians,” “When the Darkness Falls” and “Our Beloved Households and Holidays”—all of which touch upon those ways in which God’s presence is as likely to be felt in the checkout lines of our lives nowadays as in the rarified interiors of our churches.