Sundays in America by Suzanne Strempek Shea

Suzanne Strempek Shea is one of my book club's favorite authors. Based in Western Massachusetts, she teaches at Baypath College and happily makes appearances at local book clubs, including ours. For this latest work of non-fiction Suzanne traveled the country and spent each Sunday attending a different Protestant worship service. Her Catholic upbringing had prevented her from even entering non-Catholic churches; but as her own religion waned, her curiosity took hold and she bravely stepped out to experience other churches. The summaries of her visits are pulled together in Sundays in America combining their descriptions with a little autobiographical material. One gets a view of the wide variety of American religious experience, but in the end I wished that Suzanne had gone one more step to describe how the experience affected her own spirituality. Perhaps that is a work yet to come.