Bad Catholic's Guides The Bad Catholic's Guide to the Seven Deadly Sins A Vital Look at Virtue and Vice, With Quizzes and Activities for Saintly Self-Improvement

Reading this guide to the Seven Deadly Sins is the most fun you can have without actually committing them!

Wickedly funny and a sound guide to living a life that won’t end in misery but in joy. One of our best writers produces another classic.

You’re in for a treat: John Zmirak is one of the sharpest, funniest, and most gifted Catholic writers of our generation . . . this is a must-have book. He's at the absolute top of his game in discussing the Seven Deadly Sins.

John Zmirak is a theological Cyrano de Bergerac. In The Bad Catholic’s Guide to the Seven Deadly Sins he engages in wordplay like swordplay—sidestepping error and skewering fuddled thinking with razor edged logic and rapier-sharp repartee. Into his learned content he weaves wacky stories, wild illustrations and wonderful anecdotes. Zmirak writes with panache. He makes theology effervescent and vital, and moves you so much that he makes you think.

What does one say about a book by a polymath who is at the same time gloriously funny and massively serious? What we have here is a thoroughly orthodox and sane treatment of the Seven Deadly Sins by the Tom Wolfe of Catholic apologetics. He capers through the entirety of Catholic doctrine, hagiology, literature, history and contemporary culture in the course of making his case. The book is serious, weighty, and even encyclopedic—but never sententious, never turgid. 'Frolicksome' is a word that springs into one’s mind here. The reader will be instructed, blessed, and exhilarated.

If you believe that all moral instruction should be undertaken with a grim face, steer clear of this book. The sins he describes may be deadly, but Zmirak’s prose is lively. He rants and rambles, jokes and digresses, tells stories about himself—in short, entertains. Only gradually does the reader realize how many serious insights were packed in between the laughs.

This is the kind of apologetics Chesterton used—a blend of logic and ridicule, producing orthodoxy. A funny looking sort of baby, but undeniably effective.

What a great book. . . . As a non-Catholic I found it most educational and extremely funny. It is so refreshing, in this politically correct era!