My mother got me a very nice gift for my birthday. She went online to the website of the Franciscan University of Steubenville and located the required texts for their Theology 101 course.

The required texts were:
-The Holy Bible (I already had one of those!)
-The Catechism of the Catholic Church
and
-Theology for Beginners by Frank Sheed.

The latter two resources will be very nice to have. I have already read about a third of the way through Sheed's book, and it is very easy to understand but also thought-provoking.

This got me thinking that I would enjoy proceeding further through the school's theology courses and acquire even more of the texts. Franciscan's credentials are well established, so I'm sure that any resource would be well vetted before being used in the theology program.

This might be an interesting method for others to learn more about their faith!

It really can depend. In my Christology class, the professor assigned a book by Donald Senior that taught clear heresy in at least one place, and was in general just extremely shoddy. There are lots of ways to explain this. Perhaps the most charitable is to suppose that he intended us to be exposed in small doses to this kind of thought, so he could inoculate us against it. But if that were true, and you were just doing the reading all on your own, you might not get the kind of counters to the book's shortcomings that the lectures would supply.

I believe there are some fairly affordable online classes available. I haven't really studied this link carefully, but it seems OK: https://epicpew.com/8-online-programs-y ... now-about/

I agree with ... with ... I never agree with gherkin

At any rate, the fact that a given book is used in a theology class, even at a good institution, doesn't mean it's a very good book, or even good at all. I can think of at least three books in seminary that the instructors acknowledged were bad, used anyway to make us aware of what was out there.

That being said, the Sheed book is an excellent one.