“The Best Books I Read in 2023”

Dear Readers,

I was recently browsing through The Quotable [C.S.] Lewis (Tyndale, 1989), and was struck by how often Lewis extolled the virtue of re-reading books.

“You really lose a lot,” he wrote in a letter to Arthur Greeves, “by never reading books again.” And, in another letter to Greeves: “Clearly one must read every books at least once every ten years.”

My favorite comes from his essay “On Stories,” where he flatly states:”The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ‘I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work.”

This past year, I re-read passages, chapters, and even a few complete books, far more than in previous years. I’m not sure why, exactly, although having access to all my books after years of most of them being imprisoned in storage has helped, for obvious reasons.

Regardless, it seems to me that those who re-read books are also the same folks who like to share and recommend good books—new books, old books, or middle-aged books.

In this “Best Books…” list, the nineteenth such list that I’ve helped bring together, you’ll find new titles, classics, hidden gems, and a few (I think) best-sellers.

And if, like me, there are many titles here you’ve not yet read, take solace in knowing that every book that is read more than once must be read, at one time, for the first time.

Happy reading!

Pax Christi,

Carl E. Olson
Editor, Catholic World Report

 

Dale Ahlquist
Dawn Beutner
Bradley J. Birzer
Nathanael Blake
Joanna Bogle
David Bonagura
Mark Brumley
Douglas Bushman
Anthony E. Clark
David P. Deavel
Thomas M. Doran
Conor B. Dugan
Fr. Charles Fox
Jack Gist
John M. Grondelski
Ronald L. Jelinek
Christopher Kaczor
James Kalb
Julian Kwasniewski
Daniel J. Mahoney
Rob Marco
Joseph Martin
Filip Mazurczak
James R. A. Merrick
Sandra Miesel
Ines A. Murzaku
Eleanor Nicholson
Carl E. Olson
Rhonda Ortiz
William L. Patenaude
Andrew Petiprin
S.Kirk Pierzchala
Matthew Ramage
Charles Russo
Sean Salai
Fr. George E. Schultze, SJ
Paul Seaton
Monica Seeley
Russell Shaw
Piers Shepherd
Edward Short
Carl R. Trueman
John Tuttle
Joseph Tuttle
George Weigel
Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap.
Amy Welborn
Frank Wilson
Jeff Ziegler

 

Dale Ahlquist:

Socrates’ Children: The 100 Greatest Philosophers by Peter Kreeft is a monumental achievement in four volumes. There could not be a friendlier guide through the heaven, hell, and purgatory of philosophy than Peter Kreeft. I suffered with him during Hume, Hegel and the post cognitive ying-yangs. But celebrated with him through Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Pascal and—Number 100—G.K. Chesterton.

St. Catherine of Sienna by Sigrid Undset. I felt about two inches tall when I finished.

Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary by Henry Hitchings. Boswell’s Life of Johnson doesn’t really cover—first hand—the time when Samuel Johnson created his famous dictionary. This book was utterly fascinating and hugely informative, and I learned a lot of new words, like “pastern,” which is the knee of a horse.

The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain. This account of his 1867 transatlantic travels is what catapulted Twain to fame. I enjoyed his vivid description of places I have visited. His great wit is evident on every page, but perhaps what is most humorous is his mixed up repulsion and prejudice and attraction to the Catholic Church.

The World of Mr. Mulliner by P.G. Wodehouse. I took the author’s own advice and did not read more than two or three of these stories a day. Otherwise I might have hurt myself laughing.

I re-read a few Chesterton books, including The Everlasting Man. And I continued to work my way through the G.K.’s Weekly essays, which contain such lines as:

“The sort of ignorance that calls itself agnosticism is certain that it knows everything.”

“The atheist is not interested in anything except attacks on atheism.”

“The two main facts of our time are that a large and cultivated minority is thinking very badly, and that the other people are not thinking at all.”

“We Catholics must realise that by this time we are living in Pagan lands; and that the barbarians around us know not what they do.”

Dale Ahlquist is President of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Publisher of Gilbert Magazine, and Founder of the Chesterton Schools Network.

 

Dawn Beutner:

I thought I knew all about the history of abortion in America. I was wrong. In A Story of Abortion in America: A Street-Level History, 1652-2022, Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas convinced me that the battle to protect American women from manipulation, greedy abortion providers, and irresponsible men has been going on for as long as there has been an America. Learning more about our history also gave me some perspective on what we might do to change that situation today.

Speaking of death, The Good Death of Kate Montclair by Daniel McInerny is a witty, fast-paced novel about assisted suicide that I could not put down. I thought a book about death might make me cry, but I didn’t know that McInerny could make me laugh about it too. More importantly, I hope this book will make many readers see through the lie that some people are better off dead.

The Sexual Revolution is like an octopus: its tentacles are in everything. Or better yet, it’s like the air that we breathe. And how can I explain how we got this polluted air to my young adult children? Bishop Peter J. Elliott’s The Sexual Revolution: History, Ideology, Power helped me understand what has happened to us so I can explain this to others.

I love the Doctors of the Church, but they are, well, brilliant. It’s difficult to find a book that not only explains their contributions to Catholic theology but also helps you see them as real people. Fr. Aidan Nichols’ The Singing-Masters: Church Fathers from Greek East and Latin West has accomplished that balancing act. I anxiously look forward to his next book, when I hope he will cover the other twenty-five Doctors.

The best book about the spiritual life you have not yet heard about is The Grace of “Nothingness”: Navigating the Spiritual Life with Blessed Columba Marmion by Fr. Cassian Koenemann. Although Fr. Koenemann may not want me to say this, I found his explanations of humility, the spiritual life, and union with God to be even better than Blessed Columba’s writings.

Dawn Beutner is the author of The Leaven of the Saints: Bringing Christ into a Fallen World and Saints: Becoming an Image of Christ Every Day of the Year, both from Ignatius Press. 

 

Bradley J. Birzer:

Just thinking about my reading list makes my head spin a bit—but in a good way, like after an Aviation cocktail.  It was a great year for reading, and I pretty much fell in love with a number of new authors (to me) and reconfirmed my love of already known authors.

One of my favorite books of the year was Holly Ordway’s stunning biography, Tolkien’s Faith.  Beautifully researched, beautifully argued, beautifully written, Tolkien’s Faith is. . . well, a beautiful work about a beautiful man.  Throughout my adult life, I’ve done my best to keep up with Tolkien scholarship, and I can state that Tolkien’s Faith is one of the very best, if not best, works on Tolkien I’ve ever read.  Ordway’s book not only told me everything I needed to know about Tolkien’s Catholicism, but it told me about my own as well.  The book is a must own for serious Tolkien scholar or fan or, frankly, for any Catholic interested in modern literature.

Just as intriguing was the revised and expanded edition of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, originally published in 1981 and compiled by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien.  I’ve devoured my original copy probably five times.  Now, it’s wonderful to have the full book, the book as it was meant to be published thirty-some years ago.  There are a number of us who were convinced of the seriousness and depth of Tolkien’s Roman Catholicism (see my first book recommendation!), but what this revised and expanded edition does is prove that Tolkien wasn’t just Catholic, he was really, really, really Catholic.

Both of these books appeared in the second half of 2023.

In the first half, I fully immersed myself in Jonathan Eller’s magisterial three-volume biography of Ray Bradbury: Becoming Ray Bradbury; Ray Bradbury Unbound; and Bradbury Beyond Apollo.  Eller is excellent at research and writing, and I found myself living and breathing Ray Bradbury, truly one of America’s most original voices.  So taken with Eller’s biography, I ended up re-reading The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, The October Country, Something Wicked This Way Comes, a huge selection of Bradbury’s archival correspondence, and an oral history project with Bradbury by UCLA in the 1960s, “The Dogs That Ate Sweet Grass”.  Not surprisingly, I plan on writing something book-length about Bradbury and the moral imagination.  As if things couldn’t get better, Eller also recently published Remembrance: Selected Correspondence of Ray Bradbury, which I’m now just beginning.

In the category of just beginning is also Geddy Lee’s (of Rush) unfortunately named autobiography, My Effin’ Life.

The biggest reading surprise of my year, though, was Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.  As an American history professor and supposed expert on the nineteenth century, I’ve been remiss for not having read Moby Dick in the first 55 years of my life.  In high school, I had to read Billy Budd, and all the life drained out of Melville for me.  Still, I wanted to read Moby Dick.  So, this summer, I timidly opened to page one and found myself fully in love with the tale, from beginning to end.  What a weird and wild story, rich in symbolism and myth.  Now, I’m a bit of an evangelist for the book.

Finally, in the history category, I read Elliott West’s latest tome, Continental Reckoning.  It is a disturbing but brilliant look that forces one to take seriously the Indian Wars of the nineteenth century.  Indeed, the Indian wars serve as the central point of the book, noting that one can never fully understand the American Civil War or Reconstruction without knowing them.

I read so much more, but I’ve hit my 600 word limit.  Here’s to a great year!

Bradley J. Birzer is Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies and Professor of History, Hillsdale College.  He has written books on J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Christopher Dawson, Russell Kirk, and Andrew Jackson.

 

Nathanael Blake:

Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress is my pick for 2023’s book of the year. There were many other good and interesting books I read, and those that I reviewed included Patrick Deneen’s much-anticipated follow up to Why Liberalism Failed, Regime Change, which had some very good points, as well as some concerning ambiguities. Another book by a former professor of mine, Claes Ryn’s The Failure of American Conservatism and the Road Not Taken, was an excellent collection of work by an important scholar. But Harrington takes the prize for her breakthrough critique of feminism’s abandonment of the female.

Nathanael Blake, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

 

Joanna Bogle:

The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy, and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream, Charles Spencer, 2021

I had learned the list of England’s monarchs by using the old rhyme “Wiiliam, William, Harry, Ste…” but only recently got around to learning about the those following that first William. I did know about the second William, Rufus—shot in the New Forest, possibly in an accident, more probably by someone who didn’t much want him as king. So the throne in due course went to Henry. But why did we suddenly get Stephen and a civil war? The key of course was the White Ship disaster. Henry I’s son was due to sail back to England from Normandy after some jollifications—set off with a cheerful band of young toffs—and the ship sank in the Channel, and with it all of Henry I’s hopes. It all made me realize how little I knew about the Normans, which brought me to the next book on my 2023 list.

The Norman Conquest: A Very Short Introduction, George Garnett, Oxford University Press, 2009

Not really a very friendly lot, those Normans. We all relish England’s glorious cathedrals, but they seem to have in no small measure been built to squash the memories of Anglo-Saxon culture. And those great castles were definitely built to keep down the Saxons, to say nothing of the Welsh. Oh dear. I remember a young relative, reading Anglo-Saxon at Durham, denouncing the Normans as cultural vandals. Thank goodness at least Bede’s History was preserved. Anyway, since then we’ve had the eras of the Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, Hanoverians…lots more history to devour.

God in Number 10: The Personal Faith of the Prime Ministers from Balfour to Blair, Mark Vickers. 2023

A good read. What an old rogue Lloyd George was! And how priggish Tony Blair could be. And Margaret Thatcher, the daughter of a Methodist preacher, was honoured with a funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral, attended by the Queen. I enormously enjoyed this book. Poignant, somehow, that it emerged just as Number 10. Downing Street received its first specifically non-Christian Prime Minister. But Rischi Sunak read the Scriptures at the King’s Coronation extremely well, and seems to want to frame his family life around some clear values. The story continues, and Fr Mark has done us all a service in exploring this subject with historical context and fascinating detail.

Joanna Bogle is a journalist in the United Kingdom. Her book Newman’s London is published by Gracewing Books.

 

David Bonagura, Jr.:

Progress and Religion; The Crisis of Western Education, by Christopher Dawson

These two works of Dawson, separated by thirty-two years, lead to the heart of the great English convert’s historical project: that culture, the common way of life of a people, grows from religion. For this reason Dawson became, uniquely, an historian of culture. It is no wonder, then, that late in his career he turned to education, which possesses the task of passing on a culture to the next generation. Dawson’s razor-sharp mind and marching prose flourish in these two books.

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, by Carl Trueman

I have read many books that recount “how we got into this mess” of a modern world, but I think Trueman’s is the most compelling and insightful. Rather than follow the popular Cartesian path, Trueman traces the route to today’s Psychological Self, whose self-expression society must affirm, from Rousseau to the Romantic Poets to Marx to Nietzsche to Freud. From these we get the marriage of politics with sexual self-expression that has come to dominate the culture wars of the twenty-first century.

The Divine Project, by Joseph Ratzinger

Newly published in English, this gem of a book presents a series of lectures on creation and the fall—two critical themes for Ratzinger that he returned to throughout his long career—along with singular lectures on ecclesiology and pluralism. Readers of Ratzinger will find echoes of Introduction to Christianity and of his Christology throughout. Here is a paradigmatic example: “From this tree [of the cross] will come not words of temptation, but the word of love that saves; the word of obedience, in which God himself has become obedience, obedience in his very being, thus offering his obedience as the space of freedom.”

Introduction to the Devout Life, by St. Francis de Sales

This was my second trip through this book that every Catholic should read. It is a practical, fine-tuned program for all aspects of genuine Catholic living, including the intricacies of prayer, the development of the virtues, and combatting the smallest of sins. It was eye-opening for the young high school students with whom I read it. Their positive experience prompts me to recommend every parish youth group to read and discuss this book. The short chapters (each two to four pages in length) make this perfect for reflection and discussion.

Raising a Strong Daughter in a Toxic Culture, by Meg Meeker, MD

Pediatrician Meg Meeker brings thirty years of medical practice and a Christian view of culture to navigate parents through all the challenges that young girls face today, especially peer pressure and issues surrounding sexuality. Though a secular book, Meeker does not hesitate to offer evidence that belief in God, coupled with regular religious practice, is one of the greatest gifts parents can give to their daughter. One other “takeaway” tip: Dads, take your daughters out on “dates” for one-on-one time. Read Meeker’s book to learn why.

Jerome’s Tears: Letters to Friends in Mourning, by David G. Bonagura, Jr.

May I be so gauche as to recommend my own book, released this fall? Well, it’s not my own—it’s St. Jerome’s seven moving letters of consolation to friends mourning deceased spouses, children, and friends. By reading these letters, this brilliant Doctor of the Bible will soothe your grief, even if your loss was years ago.

David G. Bonagura, Jr. is an adjunct professor at St. Joseph’s Seminary and Catholic Distance University. He is the author of Steadfast in Faith and Staying with the Catholic Church. He is the translator of Jerome’s Tears.

 

Mark Brumley:

As usual, no Ignatius Press books or manuscripts are included in my list—not because none would qualify as “best books I read in 2023” but to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. It’s been a relatively light year for outside reading, because I’ve had to read a lot of manuscripts as well as work in the new Augustine Institute-Ignatius Press catechetical series, Word of Life—my day job. Plus, teach a bunch of courses and give four or five talks. All fun, of course, but they gobble up extra reading time.

The Case for Jesus, Brant Pitre. A great, popular (yet with sufficient scholarly heft) apologetic for Jesus. Hence the subtitle “The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ.” First-rate. Gave copies to my seminary students.

Telling a Better Story, Joshua Chatraw. A superb work of what I call “the newest apologetics”, which recognizes the narrative dimension of life as part of the truth-goodness-beauty aspiring aspect of being alive. Chatraw was theologian in residence at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. Now he’s at Beeson Divinity.

Ends, Gordon R. Dickson. Great sci-fi short stories by one of the sci-fi greats. Some of these short stories I had never read. One I remembered reading when I was in grade school—the masterful “Computers Don’t Argue”. Beware of computerized book clubs. People who question the dangers of AI haven’t read “Computers Don’t Argue” or they have not learned its lessons.

Surprised by Doubt: How Disillusionment Can Lead Us to Deeper Faith, Joshua Chatraw and Jack Carson. I already mentioned Joshua Chatraw above. Carson is a younger scholar in apologetics. Increasingly, evangelists, apologists, pastors, and theologians have to address questions of doubt—doubts of believers, former believers, and never-believers. This book takes seriously the truth, goodness, and beauty of the Christian story, on the one hand, and the real questions, objections, and negative experiences of people, on the other.

Liberty in the Things of God, Robert Louis Wilken. I reread this book in light of recent discussions in certain Catholic circles about what a confessional state entails and claims that Dignitatis Humanae is a modernist innovation. Wilken confirms Benedict XVI’s point that religious liberty is the greater, deeper tradition of the Church, not a modernist or semi-modernist innovation.

Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, edited by William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland.

Nonverts, Stephen Bullivant. A must-read for anyone interested in the US edition of “new religious movement” out of the churches into the none-o-sphere: the “none-of-the-above” option on the list of religions. As a former “none” (but not a former nun), I find the stories in this well-written, well-researched theological-sociological study insightful. How so many Christians became “ex’s”. Those of us eager to help bring “nones” back can learn a lot from Nonverts. (As well as listening to many former believers.)

Vatican 2: A Very Short Introduction, Shaun Blanchard and Stephen Bullivant. Great, short overview by two highly readable theologians.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence, George Zarkadakis. Fascinating treatment of artificial intelligence. Make of it what you will. ChatGPT wasn’t up-to-date on Zarkadakis or his book. I asked. The author contends our evolutionary history leads us to create AI and that AI likely won’t achieve conscientiousness. He explores the opportunities and threats of AI, all with interesting spins on the usual treatments.

The Big Questions in Science and Religion, Keith Ward. Former atheist now Anglican theologian provides a superb overview of issues of science and religion. Much of the standard territory is covered—new atheism, creation/cosmology, naturalism, the miraculous, the spirituality of the human person, the afterlife, science v. scientism, etc. But Ward brings in non-Christian religious perspectives as well. Helpful.

Benedict XVI: A Life. Vol 1, Peter Seewald. A re-read, this time with my wife. Everyone interested in Benedict XVI and, I would add, Vatican II, should read this book.

Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee. Second re-read with my wife. An outstanding companion to To Kill a Mockingbird. We encounter a very different, grown-up Scout. And, famously or infamously—you decide—a different Atticus Finch.

The Women Are Up to Something. Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb. The subtitle nails it: “How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics”. This is a fun read, even for those who don’t specialize in philosophy. It’s a great account of how these women greatly influenced the mid-20^th century shift in the Anglophone philosophical world. Not to be confused with Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachel Wiseman, which I haven’t read yet but which covers the same subject(s).

How the Fathers Read the Bible, Mike Aquilina. The title says it all. Well, not quite. You can’t glean from the title how important the liturgical context of Bible reading was for the early Christians. But you can imagine, if you try hard, a world in which the divine Word was highly prized and yet wasn’t readily available as a book from, oh, say, Ignatius Press. How did those realities—the Word of God and lack of general access to books (or literacy for that matter)—fit together? Liturgy. Find out how.

Mark Brumley, President and CEO of Ignatius Press, is author of The Seven Deadly Sins of Apologetics and 20 Answers: Catholic Social Teaching, among other things.

 

Douglas Bushman:

Matthew Minerd, Conscience: Four Thomistic Treatments (Cluny, 2022), another valuable output of the translating machine, whose contribution to making the best of pre-Vatican II Thomistic theology available for new generations is inestimable. Minerd’s own contribution complements his translation of Merkelback, Labourdette, and Beaudouin. Extremely timely, and helpful, as it seems that a major task for moral theology today is to elaborate and to defend the “participated theonomy” (Veritatis splendor, 41) that is characteristic of human dignity and freedom and man’s vocation to self-realization by participation in God’s own love. To retrieve the biblical and traditional understanding that defines conscience in terms of law is necessary for a proper grasp of man’s relation to truth, love, law, his own freedom—and God! Without this, it is difficult to see how the biblical “obedience of faith” can be anything but alienating.

Roch Kereszty and Denis Farkasfalvy, Theology in Practice. A Beginner’s Guide to the Spiritual Life (Ignatius, 2023) This is the final gift to the Church of these two Cistercian theologians, for whom theology is a vocation within the call to holiness. For this reason, theology must always exhibit the same finality as the divine revelation upon which it reflects, namely, the communion of men with God in the reception of God’s gift of himself. This book presents the wisdom of the saints about how to respond to God’s definitive initiative of love in Jesus Christ.

Ormond Rush, The Vision of Vatican II. Its Fundamental Principles (Liturgical Press Academic, 2019) The crowning achievement of decades of research and publishing on Vatican II by Rush. It is a recapitulation and synthesis of a breathtakingly broad gathering of theological reflection on the Council. It is unfortunate that the contributions to the interpretation, implementation, and reception of Vatican II by the post-Conciliar popes—Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI—is underrepresented. Rush’s great achievement in the study of Vatican II has the same limitations that Benedict XVI perceived in so much of the work of biblical exegetes. The historical-critical approach to Vatican II, to create a historiography of the Council, tends to reduce it to being a merely human event, leaving aside what only faith is able to see, namely, the divine dimension of the Holy Spirit at work. But unless the Spirit is at work, the Council has no claim on Catholic faith. As a result, its implementation cannot be an act of the obedience of faith. Much as Benedict XVI felt compelled to inject the element faith into the rich fruits of the historical critical method (his three volumes of Jesus of Nazareth), he and his predecessors were vigilant in keeping the Church alert to the divine dimension of Vatican II.

Fr. Marie-Eugene, I Am a Daughter of the Church (Fides, 1955) This has been called the greatest synthesis of Carmelite, specifically Teresian, spirituality. I re-read it about every five years. At a time when much emphasis is placed on a presumed need for a paradigm shift and new expressions in theology, if theology is to be relevant and life-giving (Francis, Ad theologiam promovendam), this masterpiece offers lasting things that are relevant in every age. Methodologically, it is based on the “theological source” of the canonized reception of divine revelation by faith, and thus on what the Holy Spirit has accomplished, in the Carmelite mystics, rather than to take generic “modern man,” alienated from his own humanity by the appropriation of secularized culture, as a “theological source” (again, Francis, Ad theologiam promovendam).

Douglas Bushman is director of Parish Formation and Mission at the Church of St. Joseph in West St. Paul, Minnesota, and past director of the Institute for Pastoral Theology at Ave Maria University and the University of Dallas.

 

Anthony E. Clark:

One of the unique challenges of a writer is to find time to read, and one of the truths of writing is that one writes better the more he reads. Early this year I finished writing a book that had been long on my desk, and I decided to push my research papers aside to indulge one of the few things I share with Edward Gibbon, an “invincible love of reading.” I also allowed myself a wide berth to moor my interests, picking up dusty books long abandoned on my shelves and purchasing books far outside of my typical patterns. A Laurence Stern wrote, “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading.”

I will soon fly to Oxford to teach a course on JRR Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, so I read Bradley Birzer’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle Earth. The Roman Catholic Oxford don emerges in this book, and one accesses the faith behind the fantasy. When addressing the question: What will Tolkien’s legacy be? Birzer answers in a way that few Tolkien devotees would. He suggests that what Tolkien conveys below all his vivid plots is that “God’s grace, like fairie, is everywhere.” Also related to England, I very much enjoyed reading Enid Chadwick’s lovely Anglo-Catholic children’s book, My Book of the Church’s Year. The masterful illustrations effectively teach the highlights of the liturgical year as I wish were still in vogue. The depictions of the Seven Sacraments on the Whit Sunday page are charming in the best ways.

At the top of my “outside the box” reading was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, my first ever Austen novel! I am now reading Emma and an addiction to her books is certain! I read two wonderful Catholic plays from the early twentieth century: Fr. Pierre-Xavier Mertens’, SJ, Chinese drama, The Martyrs of Zhujiahe (朱家河致命劇) and Henri Ghéon’s summoning French drama, Les Trois Sagesses du vieux Wang (The Three Wisdoms of Old Wang). These exquisitely crafted plays recount the stories of Chinese Catholic martyrs who invoke deep admiration for the faithful of China.

I read Pope Benedict XVI’s splendid essays in What is Christianity? The Last Writings. When chatting with Cardinal Burke once after an event in Rome, the kindly cardinal and I reveled in the genius of Joseph Ratzinger, and books such as this confirm his gifts as both a master theologian and a spiritual father. Other books were read, but the most delightful literary romp I enjoyed was Fr. Charles Murr’s Murder in the 33^rd Degree. Whatever one thinks of the events described in the book, one cannot help but be swept away in Murr’s compelling and delightful prose. Tolstoy got it right when he summarized the great joys of living: “rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”

Anthony E. Clark, PhD, is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of London, a professor of Chinese history at Whitworth University, and the author and editor of several books on Catholicism in China.

 

David P. Deavel:

Advisory board members take credit for the good and complain “they didn’t listen” if the product is mixed. As a board member for CUA Press’s new Catholic Women Writers series, I’ll take the thanks, but they are really due to editors Bonnie Lander Johnson and Julia Meszaros, who are reprinting hidden gems from Catholic Revival authors. The first two volumes, Caryl Houselander’s sole novel, The Dry Wood, and Sheila Kaye-Smith’s Fall of the House of Alard, are lyrical and spiritually insightful. Alice Thomas Ellis’s 1984 novel The Other Side of the Fire is not in their series (though Ellis is) but is filled with her usual hilarity and wry view of humanity.

For poetry, I read two good anthologies: Micah Mattix and Sally Thomas’s Christian Poetry in America Since 1940 and Edward Short’s more comprehensive St. Mary’s Book of Christian Verse. The latter’s mix of familiar classics and lesser-known gems are perfect for teachers and homeschoolers; the former’s introduction to contemporary poets delights. I also read the late Regina Derieva’s collection Earthly Lexicon. A Catholic convert with spunk and an eye for the absurd, her collected aphorisms sparkle, amuse, and accuse.

Derieva grew up in the Soviet Union as Solzhenitsyn was writing his Gulag Archipelago, to which I returned on its fiftieth anniversary (two of three volumes—it’s long!). It is as fresh, disturbing, and convicting as ever. He saw the west as falling to the same godlessness as the east did. What to do about it? I read for the first time the University of Mary volume From Christendom to Apostolic Times and found its realism and hopefulness persuasive. So too the new sequel, The Religion of the Day, which marries insight into the competing gnostic progressivism with an understanding of the Church’s enactment of Christ’s redemptive mission.

We need to know Christ and his will for us. Gilles Emery’s The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God is a concise, readable, and profound entrée to the central Christian mystery. Josef Pieper’s Faith, Hope, Love looks at the virtues poured into us at baptism with God’s life. Servais Pinckaers’ The Sources of Christian Ethics is a master class in the Christian and Thomistic moral tradition. For penetrating doctrinal and moral homilies, see Chrissa Klein’s collection of the homilies her husband, the late Fr. Leonard Klein, preached in A Grain of Wheat. For an eastern view of Christmas, read Thomas Hopko’s The Winter Pascha.

We citizens of heaven care for the earthly city. How so? Fr. Robert Sirico’s The Economics of the Parables looks closely at how economic principles inform and are enlightened by Christ’s teaching. Though a free marketer like Sirico, Alex Salter shows how Chesterton and Belloc’s political economic ideas enlighten in The Political Economy of Distributism. Hadley Arkes explains how natural law is and should be involved in jurisprudence in Mere Natural Law. Robert Delahunty and John Yoo explain America’s highest court’s past, present, and possible future in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Supreme Court. Stanley Ridgley’s Brutal Minds explains how woke conquered universities and how to fight against it. And Jason Rantz’s What’s Killing America details the laws and policies making American cities increasingly unlivable.

We need models. In the Church was Fr. Vincent McNabb, OP, whose life is recollected in great-nephew Andrew McNabb’s Walking with Father Vincent. In but not of the earthly city is late-in-life Catholic convert, political activist, and journalistic legend Stan Evans, rendered vividly in Steven Hayward’s M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom. And in my family, I was pleased to read stories of my great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-uncle, lovingly told by Lori Samuelson in Perseverance Amidst Adversity: The Ancestry of Three George Harbaughs.

David P. Deavel is Associate Professor of Theology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Thomas M. Doran:

Word for word, Jacques Philippe’s Interior Freedom is one of the most impacting books I have ever read. Fr. Philippe uses Scripture, classic works of spirituality, the example of saints, spiritually grounded psychology, storytelling, and history, to describe why the pursuit of interior freedom is essential, along with practical ways to make progress in achieving it. He tells the story of Etty Hillesum’s remarkable spiritual journey. Of her time in a Nazi prison camp, she writes that the question on the free side of the camp’s barbed wire barrier is actually a question of attitude, of who possesses interior freedom and who doesn’t. The reader of Interior Freedom may experience, as I did, the sense of a personal retreat with Fr. Philippe.

In The Matter of Everything, physicist Suzie Sheehy, who teaches in Australia and at Oxford, describes big discoveries in physics from the late 19th through the 20th century and to the present day, then explains how practical applications of these discoveries, from X-rays to MRI to particle detectors, changed the world—for better or worse depending on the application. The rapid pace of discovery and invention during this period was astounding. It’s not a dry chronicle, as personalities loom large in these breakthroughs. Viewing the film, Oppenheimer, I recognized some of these larger-than-life physicists.

David McCullough is a favorite historian, and this year I read “The American Spirit”, 15 lectures he presented at different venues: a joint session of Congress, numerous colleges, an Independence Day naturalization ceremony at Monticello, a 200th anniversary ceremony at the White House, even a Kennedy assassination memorial. Steeped in the ideas and guiding principles of the founders and our founding documents, a common theme of McCullough’s messages is connecting each venue to America’s founding principles along with a call to advance those principles. As expected in a McCullough book, well-known and obscure historical figures feature prominently and are brought to life in these presentations.

In Tim Powers’ spy novel cum fantasy, Declare, fallen angels are djinns, albeit far from Disney’s Aladdin species. Powers’ djinns are utterly alien elemental terrors with a backstory that is traditional of fallen angels in the sense of their rebelling against Heaven, and then establishing lairs in the created world, a prominent refuge being the icy peak of Mount Ararat. Involving secret offshoots of the Soviet and British spy agencies, trying to coopt and destroy the djinns respectively, the story spans World War II and the Cold War era. “He shivered as he remembered at times cowering before tall sandstorms that boomed out the old rhythmic symbols across the dunes…Never surprise them, he had learned; never reason with them.” Powers’ story made me ponder the thought that even to see our own guardian angel, without its appearance having been altered to suit our human limitations, would probably knock us for a loop, and this is a being with our very best interests in mind.

Thomas M. Doran writes about the environment, science, infrastructure, and literary topics. As T. M. Doran, his novel Seeing Red will be published by Ignatius Press in Spring 2024.

 

Conor B. Dugan:

As I look back at the year past, my reading was filled with friends old and new—perhaps more old than new. In the fiction category, there were several authors new to me including Robertson Davies and Bruce Marshall. I read Davies’ great book The Rebel Angels. It was my first Davies’ book but not my last, I hope. It reminded me of David Lodge’s campus novels in its skewering of academic pretentions. In Marshall’s case, I read The World, The Flesh, and Father Smith, a delightful novel that follows the life of a Scottish priest around the time of the First World War from parish to battlefield and back.

I also reread two classic novels, Thorton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins. The first is the instantiation of John Paul II’s insight that “in the designs of Providence there are no mere coincidences.” The latter is Percy’s semi-dystopian novel that seems more timely today than when it was written.

On the nonfiction side, I read David Schindler’s final book, The Generosity of Creation. It is not an easy book but one that will reward the patient reader. The final section, which develops Schindler’s thinking on receptivity and charitably critiques Michael Waldstein’s differing view, may seem esoteric but is a crucial and needed corrective to certain views of how man images God.

I also profited from David Schindler’s son D.C. Schindler rereading The Politics of the Real and finally reading The Catholicity of Reason. There is no better living Catholic philosopher today than Schindler and that he is not more widely known is borderline criminal. The former book is both an incisive critique of liberalism and a proposal for politics that takes metaphysical realism and anthropology, not only seriously but as primary. The latter is a book that fruitfully engages the questions of faith and reason and offers a creative development of the tradition employing Balthasar’s philosophical insights.

Speaking of Balthasar, I read his Heart of the World which is a revelation—Balthasar as poet, plumbing the deepest of spiritual oceans. It is unlike any Balthasar I’d read before and I highly recommend it. Another poetical “theologian,” whom I read was Madeleine Delbrél. I picked up Ignatius’ new The Dazzling Light of God: A Madeleine Delbrél Reader and was blown away. It is from the likes of Delbrél that true renewal in the Church and world will occur.

Three other theology books bear mentioning. I reread Father Alexander Schmemann’s classic For the Life of the World. This is a life-altering book that helps one see reality more fully and clearly. Bishop Erik Varden’s The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance was an excellent and challenging spiritual read—a modern spiritual classic from a spiritual master. And I read Joseph Ratzinger’s The Divine Project: Reflections on the Creation and the Church which seemed fitting after his death; it was a reminder of how much he has given us.

Two more books to close. Michael Heinlein’s excellent biography of Cardinal Francis George, Glorifying Christ: The Life of Cardinal Francis E. George, O.M.I., is one I hope to review in more depth and one that you should run to read. What a life Cardinal George led, and Heinlein brings him to life. Finally, a book of a very different sort is Harrison Scott Key’s How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told. Every married couple should read this hilarious and poignant book. Even if you have not experienced the marital suffering that Key and his wife have, you will profit from reading Key’s prose.

Conor B. Dugan is a husband, father of four, and attorney who lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

 

Fr. Charles Fox:

The Gift of Faith by Fr. Tadeusz Dajczer. I waited to read this book for an entire decade, from the time my spiritual director gave it to me during my third assignment as a priest (I am now serving in my sixth assignment). That saintly priest has since died, requiescat in pace, but in addition to the sage guidance and encouragement he gave me during five years as my spiritual director, he also gave me a book of power and deep insight. The Gift of Faith is a life-changing book of pastoral and spiritual theology. Father Dajczer has much to teach about the theological virtue of faith, as well as the application of these theoretical truths to the life of Catholic discipleship. “The faith of the New Testament is man’s response to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ,” Dajczer writes. “Faith is sharing in the life of God…It is the adherence to Christ, our Master, our Lord, our Friend.” In addition to its teaching on faith itself, the book is especially strong in treating the themes of poverty of spirit and abandonment to divine Providence. I am listing this book first because it has my strongest recommendation of all the books on this list. Do not wait a decade to read it!

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times … It is a far, far better thing that I do now than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.” Does any novel have so famous or so perfect a beginning and ending as A Tale of Two Cities? Dickens’ classic story of self-sacrifice during the bloody first days of the French Revolution demonstrates the superior power of love over hate and redemption over sin. It has been said that in this novel Dickens shifts from his usual emphasis on characters and dialogue to a heavier emphasis on plot. Yet the reader comes to care deeply about Sydney Carton, Charles and Lucie Darnay and their young daughter, Dr. Manette, Mr. Lorry, and Miss Pross. The novel is about many things, including time and eternity, life, death, and eternal life, and very near to its end there is a scripture that serves as an interpretive key to the whole tale: “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25-26).

The Shattering of Loneliness by Erik Varden. Dom Erick Varden is a Trappist monk and serves as Abbot of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire. He brings much learning, a love for art, music, and literature, and especially a deep piety to this work of spirituality. The subtitle of the book is On Christian Remembrance, and in this book Varden explores the theme of remembrance as anamnesis, a making-present of the reality being remembered. The Christian’s act of remembrance draws him into communion with the Lord and with his brothers and sisters in the Lord, conquering the isolation to which fallen man is doomed without Christ. Varden brings many fresh insights and sources, particularly from literature, to this brief but penetrating volume.

Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian. This is the first novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series of nautical novels, mostly set during the time of the Napoleonic Wars. It is worth noting that the 2003 film of the same name was based on the series, not on any one book. The novel is a compelling story of adventure, but it also gives a thorough introduction to life on the sea and to the European naval conflicts of the early-nineteenth century. It is an insightful study of leadership, friendship between men, personality differences, and strategic decision making.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. I have read Brideshead four times, and continue to extract more of its beauty and truth each time I read it. Interestingly, the story is a bit more complex when it comes to the third transcendental, goodness. Brideshead is a book about the goodness of God, and his ability to sanctify those who will at least open themselves up a smidgeon to His grace. But it is not really about characters who themselves exemplify goodness. The novel examines the narrow victories of grace in the lives of those who, generally, have not been good, but who at some decisive moment allow their hearts to be invaded by the goodness of God, having been enticed to this moment of surrender by beauty and truth.

Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit by P.G. Wodehouse. Never was such beautiful English prose expended on such seemingly inconsequential stories as in the Jeeves stories of P.G. Wodehouse. And yet the reader of depth and sensitivity (so this reader imagines) will discover that there are treasures to be discovered in the bromidic adventures of Bertie Wooster and his uber-valet, Reginald Jeeves: joy, the interplay of order and disorder, the last vestiges of a truly Christian culture, and self-sacrificial loyalty to one’s family and friends. I especially recommend the Jeeves audiobooks narrated by Jonathan Cecil.

Fr. Charles Fox is an assistant professor of theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit.

 

Jack Gist:

The Vertical Ascent: From Particles to the Tripartite Cosmos and Beyond, Wolfgang Smith, Philos-Sophia Initiative Foundation, 2020. For non-physicists with a metaphysical bent, Dr. Smith’s book overcomes Cartesian dualism and re-vitalizes metaphysics by challenging the assumptions of scientism that have dominated the modern era.

God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design, edited by Ann Gauger, Ph.D., Sophia Institute Press, 2023. A collection of essays that makes a convincing case for ID from a Catholic perspective.

City of God, St. Augustine, translated by G.E. McCracken, Loeb Classical Library, 1957. If you’ve never read this classic of Catholic wisdom, it’s time to seize the day and read it. You’ll be glad you did. The Loeb edition has the Latin text facing the English translation. If you need to brush up on your Latin or want to learn it, here’s your chance.

The Catholic Writings of Orestes Brownson, Michael P. Federici, University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Brownson has often been overlooked by mainstream academia but his insights into Catholicism as it unfolded in America around the Civil War are important if at times controversial.

Gist has published books, short stories, poems, essays, and opinion pieces in outlets such as The Imaginative Conservative, Catholic World Report, Crisis Magazine, The New Oxford Review, Galway Review, St. Austin Review, and others.

 

John Grondelski:

Full disclosure: there are certain books I just keep re-reading because of their perennial value. At the top of that list is Karol Wojtyła, Love and Responsibility. It’s sixty-plus years old now, but it remains as vital as when I first read it in 1983. Its fundamental insights about man’s binary choice—one can “love” someone or one can “use” them—is corroborated more and more every day.

More recent titles:

Joseph Ratzinger, The Divine Project: Reflections on Creation and the Church (Ignatius, 2023). The doctrines of creation and salvation are not separable nor are they are not independent of God’s personal project of love for human persons. Makes you realize just how much deism—even among Christians—warps Anglo-American thought.

Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas, The Story of Abortion in America: A Street-Level History, 1652-2022 (Crossway, 2023)—a very readable history of abortion that disproves the Left’s myth that there was no American regulation of abortion until Connecticut’s in 1821.

Mary Eberstadt, Adam and Eve after the Pill, Revisited (Ignatius, 2023) asks what happens morally and socially when we lose senses of father, God the Father, and Fatherland.

Margaret Turek, Atonement (Ignatius, 2022), offers insights into how atonement represents not mere negation by a “walking back” of sin; she’s going on sabbatical to continue writing, and I can’t wait.

Guillaume de Menthière’s La Necessaire Conversion: Jamais Trop Tôt, Jamais Trop Tard [The Necessary Conversion: Never Too Soon, Never Too Late](Editions de Beatitudes, 2015) is part of that French priest’s writings on sin and conversion, topics too-neglected in our “accompanying” and “welcoming” Church. He deserves translation.

Gen. Mick Ryan, White Sun War (Casemate 2023) a fictional scenario of a possible mainland Chinese attempt to seize Taiwan in the late 2020s. The scenario may be fictional, but its tactics/technologies may be helpful to those of us who affirm the vitality of just war theory to imagine what warfare today could look like.

Allen, Hodges et al., Future War and the Defense of Europe (Oxford 2021) envisions what, until about two years ago, all sorts of “experts” all pooh-poohed as impossible at the “end of history”: a Russian threat to Europe. Written in the midst of COVID, it anticipated Euros would undertake a post-pandemic social spending spree rather than fund militaries. Reality and Russia forced course changes, but the book’s basic assumptions are correct.

Romanus Cessario’s The Seven Sacraments of the Catholic Church (Baker Academic, 2023) recovers the idea that the sacraments cause and do not just celebrate grace.

José Granados, Introduction to Sacramental Theology: Signs of Christ in the Flesh (Cath Univ Press, 2021) recovers the sacraments’ role of embodiment, a vital insight in a quasi-gnostic, anti-corporeal age.

Finally, Roman Brandstaetter, a Polish writer who insisted his becoming Catholic was the fulfillment of his Judaism, remains a jewel of a writer still unknown among English readers. His short novella retelling the story of Jonah in Hasidic style but from a Catholic perspective—a good man who, nevertheless, talks himself into believing God cannot want to save Gentile deplorables like Ninevites—is led despite his stubbornness to understand Yahweh’s loving designs toward humanity and toward him. Apart from its original Polish, the short story is available as Der Prophet, Der Fisch und Die Stadt [The Prophet, the Fish, and the City](Leipzig: St Benno Verlag, 1984). I’ve translated it into English, but it needs a publisher. Likewise valuable, untranslated, and awaiting publication is his free verse collection on the life of Christ, Je chante mon Christ [I Sing My Christ](Paris: Cana, 1983).

John M. Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey.

 

Ronald L. Jelinek:

Before Tucker Carlson was ousted, I was a big fan of his Fox Nation show. His sometimes-hour-long interviews were must-watch. One of his best featured Vivek Ramaswamy. Halfway through, I ordered Woke, Inc.  Whatever you think of Ramaswamy, his take on the threat presented by progressive-agenda-pushing c-suites is spot-on. Another great Tucker interview highlighted now-presidential candidate RFK, Jr. He and I don’t likely share many political positions but I admire his courage. Despite being part of the Bel-Air and Brentwood cocktail party circuit (he’s married to liberal actress Cheryl Hines), his COVID questions win him no friends and plenty of public loathing from the prettiest and most popular. If you’re curious, read even just the first 100 pages of his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. And do the same with Edward Dowd’s Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022. Both are meticulously-cited and supported with astonishing data; you’ll be haunted by questions. Then peruse The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet. He’s a highly-acclaimed, award-winning researcher and professor of clinical psychology and another of Tucker’s guests. Desmet’s book offers a succinct and sobering account of how fear, loneliness and isolation can destroy liberty and how governments and their media partners used them during COVID (and perhaps still) to do some unimaginable things.

Free Speech and Why it Matters is a fresh reminder of our present culture war. Written by Andrew Doyle—an Oxford-educated political satirist who describes himself as left-wing—it stands the best chance of any on my list of having its cover cracked by a faculty member in the sociology department. I followed this one with a fun, easy-to-understand primer on the love of knowledge: A Fool’s Errand: A Brief, Informal Introduction to Philosophy for Young Catholics by Matthew D’Antuono. As a dad of a Catholic high school student, I can confirm: confidently share it with your thinking Catholic teen. Next on the syllabus, consider Fr. Robert Sirico’s The Economics of the Parables. It offers a Catholic social teaching perspective on the market exchange, the human person and the eternal good.

July 4th annually brings an opportunity to renew one’s love of nation. Three great books helped me celebrate. Joseph Ellis’ American Sphinx is a highly-readable, even-handed portrait of Thomas Jefferson. Tom Cotton’s Sacred Duty: A Soldier’s Tour at Arlington National Cemetery is a veteran’s touching tribute to those buried across the bridge from DC. Gary Sinise offers a citizen’s homage in his inspiring, Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service.

My Catholic men’s book club provided some of this year’s best reading. We bookended the calendar with two C.S. Lewis picks: Perelandra and The Four Loves (the latter’s take on friendship deserves to be read and re-read). Enjoyed consecutively, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Francois Mauriac’s A Kiss for the Leper provide contrasting accounts of married husbands and wives. Waugh’s couple is foolishly devoid of the divine, each individual living completely separate and tragically, self-absorbed lives while Mauriac’s husband and wife are each privately paralyzed by an awareness of their own sin. Myles Connelly’s The Bump on Brannigan’s Head was a surprise—seemingly simple and straightforward, it’s a thought-provoking read with great characters. Less surprising but equally excellent is Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson. Recommended by Popes Francis and Benedict XVI, at its conclusion, you may find yourself prompted to re-read parts of other books on this list (especially RFK Jr.’s, Dowd’s and Desmet’s). Still so very many questions.

Merry Christmas.

Ronald L. Jelinek, Ph.D. is a Professor of Marketing at Providence College. The opinions expressed here are his own.

 

Christopher Kaczor:

In How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply by New York Times, columnist David Brooks displays the author’s humor and humility, “When I was eighteen, the admission officers at Columbia, Wesleyan, and Brown decided I should go to the University of Chicago.” He admits that for him to learn to exchange emotional intimacy, “was like watching a walrus trying to figure skate—it wasn’t good, but you were impressed that you were seeing it at all.”

Peter Kreeft’s four volume Socrates’ Children: An Introduction to Philosophy from the 100 Greatest Philosophers treats greatest ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary philosophers by putting them into dialogue with each other and by providing sketches of their lives. These books provide a readable, accessible overview of the “big picture”, and philosophy’s development from its ancient Greek origins.

Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus by Thomas Ward helped to overcome to a great degree my long held Thomistic prejudice against the subtle doctor.

In his book From Here to Eternity: Reflections on Death, Immortality, and the Resurrection of the Body, Randall B. Smith provides profound and winsome consideration of what awaits us all, drawing on insights ancient and contemporary, secular and sacred.

All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory by Edward Feser calls into question the critical race theory of Ibram X. Kendi in part by calling to attention its Marxist and philosophically untenable foundations.

This fall I had the pleasure of rereading Dante’s Divine Comedy with a group of bright undergraduate students in Anthony Esolen’s translation of and superb notes for the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell should be required reading at all universities, but, alas, is least likely to be read by those who need to read it most.

The Image of God: The Problem of Evil and the Problem of Mourning by Eleonore Stump is the last of her three volumes on suffering and the existence of God, the first being Wandering in Darkness and the second Atonement. She provides absolutely fantastic interpretations of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus in the Gospels.

The Divine Project: Reflections on Creation and the Church by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) is a treasure for better understanding the first chapters of the book of Genesis.

Finally, although they are not books, I’ve learned a massive amount from two podcasts. The Huberman Lab podcast, of Prof. Andrew Huberman at Stanford Medical School, discusses science in a way accessible to non-scientists and provides practical science-based tools for everyday life. British historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland host The Rest Is History podcast in which they discuss a wide range of significant events and people from ancient Rome to the assassination of JFK, from the death of Jesus to CIA interventions in Chile, from ancient figures like Muhammad and Nero to recent figures like Churchill and Oscar Wilde.

Christopher Kaczor is Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University, Honorary Professor at Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire Institute, and co-author of Jordan Peterson, God and Christianity: The Search for a Meaningful Life.

 

James Kalb:

A few books worth mentioning:

Two classic Christian apocalyptic fantasy/sci-fi novels that deal—as such novels do—with the relation between eternal realities and life here and now: C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, and Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz. The former tends toward fantasy and the philosophical, the latter toward sci-fi and the tension between a pre-conciliar vision of the Church (the book was published in 1959) and the brutal realities of a post-nuclear world.

Brian Moore, Black Robe. More on brutal realities and supernatural faith. A convincing depiction of Jesuits, Indians, and French civilians in 17th c. Quebec that mostly presents their habits and visions of life as cultural responses to very different circumstances. The book would not seem so true to life if it were reductive, though, and suggestions that the supernatural may after all be real keep creeping in.

Primo Levi, The Periodic Table. It’s hard to square the great humanity of this collection of mostly autobiographical stories with the insistence on scientific materialism with which it ends. But he was a perceptive man, and saw horrible things at Auschwitz and elsewhere. Maybe it was all too much for him?

Paul Elmer More, The Greek Tradition. A series of books by the “New Humanist” literary critic (1864-1937) who became an idiosyncratic and not-altogether-orthodox Christian apologist. It covers the development of Greek religious thought from Plato to the Council of Chalcedon and intends—with some success—to show how questions that arise in normal human experience, considered fairly, find their resolution in basic Catholic doctrines like the Incarnation, Resurrection, and sacramental system.

Emily Dickinson, Poems. Someone (like me) who tries to write but stumbles a great deal can find it a shock to see how well it can be done when the talent and inspiration are there. There are also of course less idiosyncratic reasons for reading Miss Dickinson’s extraordinarily personal, compressed, and intense poems.

The Arabian Nights. The famous accumulation of the world’s best stories, shot through with a love of wonder and sensual delight, along with a feeling of dream-like arbitrariness heightened by sporadic terror and a sense of the inscrutable divine will. There are lots of translations and versions. I tried the fairly recent Muhsin Mahdi/Husain Haddawy one, apparently more authentic than most, which I’d recommend.

James Kalb is an author lawyer, independent scholar, and Catholic convert who lives in Brooklyn, New York.

 

Julian Kwasniewski:

Peter Ramey’s The Word-Hoard Beowulf is probably the latest of innumerable renditions of the Old English epic. Here, however, the rich and wild language of the original is unleashed with extensive notes. Buckle your seatbelt and prepare for an adrenaline rush: glory, power, strength, praise course through Beowulf’s rippling muscles. If you’re a man, the tossing salt spray, spurting blood, and mythic hordes will revive your manhood and make you look for the neighborhood dragon. If you’re a woman, then it will … actually, I don’t know. Make you wish for a Viking lover?

Psychedelic Catholic fiction, also known as Brian Christopher Moore’s Beneath the Silent Heavens. A biblical fantasy with an astonishingly modern flair which includes stream of consciousness passages, it is often more poetry than prose. It’s like a mix of all the Inklings, but 21st century edition. You won’t be able to put it down.

One book that has cropped up throughout the year is Joseph Shaw’s The Liturgy, the Family, and the Crisis of Modernity. To be fair, I did design its cover, but that is not what makes it such a good book. A non-polemical discussion on some of the hottest topics like Vatican II, feminism, and patriarchy, Shaw uses a truly new approach and argumentation to tease out important conclusions on these topics. I hope this book becomes a classic. If you care, I liked it so much that I reviewed it twice (here and here) and interviewed the author, asking questions that cropped up after I finished reading it.

Julian Kwasniewski is a musician specializing in renaissance Lute and vocal music, an artist and graphic designer, as well as marketing consultant for several Catholic companies.

 

Timothy D. Lusch:

This past year was predictably frustrating in the quantity—not quality—of books I read. But I suppose quality is the thing. Since this is a best of the year list, I begin—rather logically—with 365 Days by Ronald Glasser. Glasser served as a medical doctor in Japan during the Vietnam War. He arrived just as the wounded were being shipped over during the Tet Offensive. The wounded—and some of the nurses who cared for them—shared their stories with Glasser. He wrote them down to honor their experience. The stories in this book are gripping, haunting, and exist on a plain somewhere between ghastly reality and heroic myth. Like Michael Herr’s Dispatches, these stories and vignettes will stay with you.

Mining the same vein, Doug Stanton’s The Odyssey of Echo Company was a surprise find. I Picked it up for a few bucks on the bargain rack and it was worth so much more. It centers around the life of Stan Parker, son of an itinerant ironworker, who went to Vietnam with a full heart and patriotic fervor, only to find—as so many others did—that whatever the U.S. was doing there, it certainly wasn’t to win a war. His experience was searing. The real story—as with many others—is how he managed to preserve his fragmented humanity and find wholeness again decades later.

There is something of wholeness in Bruce Brooks Pfieffer’s Frank Lloyd Wright. It is a gorgeous book—as are all of Taschen’s offerings—but Pfieffer’s insights into Wright’s architectural and artistic thinking make this a book to linger long over. Lingering is a requirement in Hammershøi, published by the Royal Academy of Arts as a catalog of the first retrospective of Vilhem Hammershøi’s art in the United Kingdom. Known for capturing silence, stillness, and solitude in domestic interiors, Hammershøi entrances. Even after you read about his technique, mystery mixes with the oils and his paintings elicit feelings like few others I’ve encountered.

Mysteries were things physicists at the turn of the twentieth-century could not abide. Tobias Hürter’s wonderfully engaging book about the birth of quantum physics, Too Big for a Single Mind, tells the tale of the titanic shift the field of physics underwent as Einstein, Pauli, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, and others were trying to describe—or admitting that they could not describe—whether and how subatomic particles behaved in accord with accepted theories (largely Einsteinian) of the day.

Theory was a luxury one could not afford in 1940s Mexico. John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins relied on every bit of their practical wisdom, common sense, and guts as they encountered love and violence south of the border in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. McCarthy can be grim going at times, but this book is punctuated with the hard bitten humor of life in the saddle. Humor is also prominent among the saints—they were human despite our efforts to make them otherwise—and one comes away with a new appreciation for the lives of the holy men and women God raised up at times when the Church and the world so badly needed them in Randy Petrides’s How the Saints Shaped History. It is a unique perspective and Petrides tells the tales masterfully.

Timothy D. Lusch is an attorney and writer.

 

Daniel J. Mahoney:

As the Synodal Church talks endlessly about talking and a thousand ways to accommodate the late modern world, the thoughtful and faithful Catholic searches for intellectual depth and spiritual ballast. Those qualities, tied to rare theological and philosophical acumen, can be found in Benedict XVI, With God You Are Never Alone: The Great Papal Addresses, edited by Father Federico Lombardi and published this year by Bloomsbury. Here are all the trademarks of a great “Doctor of the Church” who exercises capacious reason at the service of faith and who warns against the pure subjectivism that subverts authentic faith and reason, as well as freedom rightly understood. No one understood the “moral ecology of freedom” better than Benedict XVI and his great Polish predecessor, John Paul II.

The perfect complement to this volume is Who Believes Is Not Alone, My Life with Benedict XVI, the splendid testament proffered to us by Archbishop Georg Gänswein, the pope and pope emeritus’s longtime personal secretary. Available in a lovely edition from St. Augustine’s Press, this lucid, succinct, and heartfelt book sets the record straight against calumnies old and new. Above all, it makes clear Benedict’s immense contribution to the Church, a contribution rooted in his unparallelled grounding in Scripture and the Christian classics, as well as in his deep friendship with Our Lord Jesus Christ.

And let me conclude by recommending two Russian classics that are at the same time unsurpassed gifts to universal humanity. Michael R. Katz’s remarkably lucid and accessible new translation of The Brothers Karamazov, out this year from Liveright, both illumines the linguistic shifts and prevarications that are central to Dostoevsky’s literary voice, and the Russian writer’s haunting efforts to defend the image of God in man against Ivan Karamazov’s frontal assault on a world where not everything is permitted. The book is more contested, more dialogic, more polyphonic, than most readers appreciate, even if Dostoevsky never abandons hope or transcendent grace.

And do not miss the 50th anniversary commemorative edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, just out from Vintage Classics in London and graced by a luminous Foreword (“The Gift of Incarnation”) by the author’s widow Natalia Solzhenitsyn. This powerful indictment of ideological despotism and all its works, is, she argues, at its heart an “epic poem” about “the ascent of the human spirit, about its struggle with evil.” Solzhenitsyn, too, does not leave us forlorn: “[W]hen readers reach the end of the work, they feel not only pain and anger, but an upsurge of strength and light.”

Daniel J. Mahoney is Professor Emeritus at Assumption University and Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute.

 

Rob Marco:

Happy Are You Poor (Thomas Dubay)

Happy Are You Poor is one of the more challenging books I have read; not because of how it is written, but because the author doesn’t let the reader off the hook. Fr. Dubay takes seriously the admonition of Christ for all believers, religious and married alike, to live out lives of Gospel simplicity. It is a practical but uncomfortable read because there is no formula or specific proscription; rather, he challenges the reader to embrace poverty (which is not the same as destitution) as a means of freedom and detachment, something we Americans get defensive about. It is the kind of book you chew over and let marinate in your soul, but it does not give you a pass.

33 Days to Merciful Love (Michael Gaitley)

My wife and I have been reading a chapter a day of this Do-It-Yourself Retreat in preparation for Consecration to Divine Mercy. In the spirit of his popular 33 Days to Morning Glory (which we also read), Gaitley uses St. Therese’s spiritual practice of radical trust as a path toward sainthood. Like many people, St. Therese’s piety initially grated on me, but the more I read her, the more I was enlightened to the profound wisdom of her Little Way. She is now one of my favorite intercessors.

Sins of the Tongue (Monseigneur Landriot, Archbishop of Rheims)

The full title of this work—a series of 19th century spiritual conferences translated from the French—is Sins of the Tongue or Jealousy in a Woman’s Life. As a man, it seemed strange to pick up a book that is primarily addressed to women and their particular struggles in this area. But I found that many of the sins Monseigneur Landriot seeks to incise from the lives of women can just as easily be found in anyone serious about their spiritual lives—gossip, curiosity, envy, jealousy, judgment, lack of patience: these are pernicious and potentially mortal defects that need the skilled hands of a spiritual surgeon to cut out from the patient. Like Happy Are You Poor, it is a challenging read because the archbishop pulls no punches and not only identifies the cancer, but prescribes the cure.

Priest and Beggar (Kevin Wells)

Kevin Wells tells the inspiring story of Venerable Aloysius Schwartz, an American missionary priest who served the “poorest of the poor” in South Korea in the wake of the Korean War. Wells has a way of bringing to life the spirit and humanity of this American-born priest with a martyr’s heart for the poor, inspiring us to follow God wherever He leads and to live out the mandate of Christ in the 25th chapter of St. Matthew’s gospel: “whatever you did for the least of these little ones, you did for me.”

The Book of Confidence (Fr. Thomas de Saint Laurent)

This short treatise is up there with St. Alphonsus’ Uniformity With God’s Will, which is one of my go-to works to revisit the fundamentals of the spiritual life: trust, abandonment, and surrender. In a despairing world tempted by a kind of neo-Jansensism, the Book of Confidence imbibes the spirit of the Little Flower’s “abasement of trust” to learn how to be holy—not on our own merits, but by trusting God in all things.

Rob Marco is a married father of three. He holds a MA in Theology from Villanova University. 

 

Joseph Martin:

Read:

Elisabeth Elliot: A Life. And what a life it was. Lucy Austen’s tightly-written bio tells it well.

The Cake and the Rain. Veteran songwriter Jimmy Webb reflects on his journey from preacher’s son to pop aristocrat, name dropping like crazy along the way.

Self-Portrait in Black and White. Thomas Chatterton Williams explains to his four-year-old daughter that he is “what we call black.” She replies, “You are beige.” From that exchange this exposition comes.

There and Back Again: A Somewhat Religious Odyssey. Dwight Longenecker doesn’t know me from Adam, but way back in 2002 I reached out to him via e-mail and he responded with a kind and thoughtful reply. That’s how I already knew he’s the real deal. This autobiography confirms it. Turning the pages you can almost catch the gleam in his eye.

Once Upon a Prime. Fun stuff from Sarah Hart on the intersection where math and literature meet. African Founders, David Hackett Fischer. Black lives matter.

Joseph Smith and the Mormons. The colorful tapestry of early Mormon history has more than a few wild and wooly loose threads. Artist Noah Van Scivner pulls them all together in a graphic novel I’d never guess would work as seamlessly as it does. Those unfamiliar with the tale of LDS origins will find it a revelation; those who’ve traversed the extant literature will quickly realize they’re handling a bona fide achievement.

Dear Data, Stefanie and Georgia Lupi. 52 pairs of hand-drawn postcards between graphic designers on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

The Librarianist. Patrick de Witt’s novel visits The Forbidden Zone of life after 60 where no one’s supposed go.

The Thomistic Response to the Nouvelle Théologie. Matthew Minard revisits theological debates between 1960s heavy hitters like Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange and Maurice Blondel. File under: Unending Discussions about Vatican II.

Letters From That City. Thomas Crean explains how Scripture is more true than you ever imagined it to be.  File under: The Late Great International Council on Biblical Inerrancy.

The Doctrine of Good Works. Thomas McCall writes a good book that’s ecumenical in the best sense of the word. File under: For the Love of Louis Bouyer.

Seen:

My Family Mi Familia (1995). Three generations of Angelenos navigate separation, accommodation, and assimilation in East L.A. Muy bien; Obit (2016), A cram course in journalism so good it makes you almost like the New York Times; Journey to Bethlehem (2023), Marian infelicities aside, the whole thing exudes undeniable uplift. Think The Nativity Story meets High School Musical. You’ve been warned.

Heard:

In the Throes, Buddy & Julie Miller. Reverby, atmospheric roots music (with the bonus of a rare Bob Dylan appearance); B Sides & Rarities Vol. 2, Rumer. The very definition of ‘Adult Contemporary’; Loved By You, Riley Clemmons / Crosses, Trey Simon. I know I joke on K-Love, but it really has done yeoman’s work in providing godly ambient noise. Twice in a year I had to stop the car to Shazam these songs that spoke to me from the dashboard.

Lastly: Catholic apologists too often take embarrassing pains to explain why they’re not ‘People of the Book.’ But over a long career Peter Kreeft has disarmingly distinguished himself as a man at the service of the Bible as well as the Church. Food for the Soul is his ambitious series of reflections on the three-year cycle of Scripture readings at Sunday Mass. A newly issued final volume completes the three-book devotional set, and the net result is something unique and uniquely usable. For my money it’s a contemporary classic. File under: Good and Faithful Servant.

Joseph Martin is Associate Professor of Communication and Graphic Design at Montreat College.

 

Filip Mazurczak:

The passing of Pope Benedict XVI on the last day of 2022 inspired me to study his life and teachings in greater detail. During my “Benedict Year,” I especially enjoyed Benedict XVI: A Life, Peter Seewald’s magisterial two-volume biography of the pontiff. Both books were an engrossing account of not only Benedict’s life but also of the history of the Catholic Church and Ratzinger’s native Germany in the twentieth century (nevertheless, I did find numerous non-malicious factual errors in Seewald’s commendable work). I also enjoyed reading Georg Gänswein’s memoir Who Believes Is Not Alone: My Life Beside Benedict XVI, although its content frequently overlaps with Seewald’s biography. Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth and What Is Christianity? helped to remind me of the basics that we Catholics and Christians believe (although for a non-theologian like myself, the former book was not always easy).​​​​​​​

Of the history books I read in 2023, Alexandra Richie’s Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler, and the Crushing of a City was particularly memorable, albeit disturbing. While acknowledging the grave errors the leadership of the Polish underground made in the summer of 1944 when deciding to try to liberate Warsaw from Nazi Germany, Richie pays homage to the bravery of tens of thousands of Polish partisans who defended their homeland and reminds the reader of the cruelty of which man is capable. In response to the rising, the SS and its collaborators killed between 150,000 and 200,000 Varsovians, mostly civilians, and obliterated 85 percent of the Polish capital’s buildings. Władysław Szpilman had initially published his famous memoir The Pianist in Polish as The Death of a City; Richie movingly chronicles the death of Warsaw, one of the great tragedies of World War II.

Another memorable work of history I read in 2023 was David E. Hoffman’s Give Me Liberty: The True Story of Oswaldo Payá and His Daring Quest for a Free Cuba. The book’s eponymous protagonist was a devoutly Catholic Cuban engineer who tried to take advantage of a provision in the island dictatorship’s 1976 constitution that mandated a referendum for a civic initiative with 11,000 signatures. Give Me Liberty traces Payá’s struggle, which met with harassment from state security and ultimately led to the dissident’s killing by the regime. Payá was inspired by his Catholic faith, the witness of Pope St. John Paul II, and the conviction that it is God, not the state, that grants humans their dignity and resulting fundamental rights; perhaps someday he will be beatified as a modern-day martyr of communism.

I also loved Aude Dugast’s biography, Jérôme Lejeune: A Man of Science and Conscience. Lejeune was a twentieth-century Catholic French scientist and pediatrician who discovered the chromosomal basis for Down Syndrome. Two years ago, Pope Francis declared him venerable. Lejeune was not primarily interested in fame and recognition; in fact, his pro-life activism led to pariah status and hostility from the international scientific community. One can presume that this is the primary, if not sole, reason why he never won a Nobel Prize for his discovery. Contrary to the zeitgeist of the West since the 1960s, Lejeune advocated for legal protection of the most fundamental right of the unborn. Meanwhile, his former patients remember him as a kind and self-sacrificing physician. The witness of Dr. Lejeune is instructive to us Christians in Western democracies: while the world scoffs at what we hold sacred, fidelity will eventually be rewarded by God in the afterlife and also by men of good will, who will remember us as those who stood up for the truth and for justice.

Filip Mazurczak is a journalist, translator, and historian.

 

James R. A. Merrick:

The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform by Uwe Michael Lang (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Fr. Lang is the author of several significant books on liturgy with Ignatius Press. This book should become the standard textbook on the historical development of the Roman Rite. One of its virtues is that it has benefited from the last fifty years of biblical, patristic, and medieval scholarship. This allows Lang to correct certain biases as well as update the dating or authenticity of different documents. Lang also overturns certain narratives about the development of the liturgy. He shows that the priestly and sacrificial elements were present from the very beginning. The communal meal aspect, in other words, was not the primary focus of the primitive Mass while sacrifice was a medieval corruption. Moreover, the liturgy was not really in a state of flux until the Council of Trent, but was established in the late ancient and early medieval periods. This is not to say the liturgy didn’t undergo change. But, shows Lang, there is fundamental continuity in the ritual of the Mass and changes often ornamentations or elaborations.

Liturgical Theology in Thomas Aquinas: Sacrifice and Salvation History by Franck Quoëx (Catholic University of America Press, 2023)

The late Fr. Quoëx demonstrates how Aquinas’ treatments of religion, sacrality, sacrifice, priesthood, and the sacraments are far from mere medieval speculations but sit well with insights from contemporary religious anthropology as well as recent advances in our understanding of the biblical narrative. What this volume holds out for readers is a robust theory of sacrifice and its accompanying priestly and sacred actions that are necessary for a proper theological-anthropological understanding of liturgical rite.

A Forest of Symbols: The Traditional Mass and Its Meaning by Abbé Claude Barthe (Angelico, 2023)

Recent discussions in the aftermath of Pope Francis’ motu proprio Traditionis Custodes shows that most people, including erudite scholars, think the Second Vatican Council’s emphasis on “active participation” of the faithful in the liturgy necessitated the ensuing liturgical changes. But few actually define “active participation”; most rather baldly assume such is verbal and sensual. What is wonderful about Abbé Barthe’s book, now available in English, is how he reveals the ancient and medieval mindset. In comparison, the modern emphasis on discursive worship appears shallow. Barthe reminds us that the Mass is a drama, the drama of salvation, where its movements represent the movements of salvation history and the life of Christ.

Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament: Evidence for Early Composition by Jonathan Bernier (Baker Academic, 2022)

Bernier’s book is very important. For too long, there has been a prejudice toward late dating the New Testament (NT) documents, which is often part of a package of skepticism regarding the historicity of the NT. While conservative evangelical scholars have provided lines of resistance, no one since John A.T. Robinson has written a scholarly monograph that proposes both a methodology and comprehensive assessment for dating. After arguing for three levels of historiographical analysis—synchronization, contextualization, and authorial biography—Berneir examines the documents of the NT. He concludes that most of the documents should be dated before 70AD.

The Historical Jesus and the Temple: Memory, Methodology, and the Gospel of Matthew by Michael Patrick Barber (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Another prejudice that has plagued NT scholarship is the Protestant view that Jewish worship was rendered obsolete by Jesus’ sacrifice. This prejudice was exaggerated by Enlightenment individualism and insistence on rational religion, which were accompanied by critiques of priesthood, ritual, sacrifice, and superstition. While scholars have sought to recover the Jewishness of Jesus, the role and understanding of the Temple has still suffered. Barber contributes both to the study of Matthew’s gospel and to the historical Jesus. He shows that Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus’ relationship to the Temple is plausible historically. But he also explains how Jesus clearly transfers the Temple cult to the Church and the Eucharist. Barber is an important Catholic voice in a field that has been typically dominated by Protestant exegetes, and this work helpfully defends the Catholic understanding of the New Testament as a fulfillment (not abrogation) of the Old.

Religious Liberty and the Hermeneutic of Continuity: Conservation and Development of Doctrine at Vatican II by R. Michael Dunnigan (Emmaus Academic, 2023)

As far as I can tell, this is the most comprehensive and up-to-date book on the questions concerning Vatican II’s teaching on religious liberty in Dignitatis Humanae. It will serve as a significant argument to those who have studied the surrounding controversy as well as a sure guide for beginners. Dunnigan very helpfully orients readers to a range of topics: the controversy surrounding Dignitatis Humanae, its various interpretations, the doctrinal topics that attend relate to religious liberty, the larger question of the relationship between Church and State, the true nature of doctrinal development, the teaching of the nineteenth century Magisterium on religious liberty, and the drafting of and need for Dignitatis. In the final analysis, he argues that far from being a departure from previous magisterial teaching, Dignitatis at once conserves and develops it through the aspect of human integrity.

Dr. James R. A. Merrick is a lecturer in the Department of Theology at Benedictine College and Managing Editor of Kansas Monks.

 

Sandra Miesel:

This year, my Best Book list will start with my favorite, followed by brief remarks on the others, alphabetical by author.

Peter Brown, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History. Princeton, 2023. “Charm” is not a term usually applied to academic books but one that best suits this superb memoir by the preeminent historian of Late Antiquity. Brown’s personal and professional life smoothly intertwines to trace developments in how history is taught and thought. His long and distinguished career is a gracious tribute to Clio’s beauty.

Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind. InterVarsity Press, 2022. Gracefully explores the medieval models behind Lewis’s fictional worlds and non-fictional writings.

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Vintage, 2005. The minutely researched biography behind the Christopher Nolan film depicts a genius far too brilliant for his own good.

Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. Public Affairs, 2020. An alarming discussion of ominous contemporary trends, all striving to deify the ravenous imperial Self.

Kate Cooper, Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine’s Confessions. Basic, 2023. Portraits of St. Augustine’s mother, concubine, fiancé, and a contemporary empress embedded in their social context.

Eleanor Jones-Havey and Hans-Dieter Sues, Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art,  Nature, and Culture. Princeton, 2020. A gorgeously illustrated survey of the Prussian polymath’s achievements, published to accompany an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s  American Art Museum.

Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World A.D., 275-425. Cambridge, 2011. An exhaustive analysis of the brutal institution on which Roman civilization–Christian as well as pagan–depended.

Alix Paré and Valérie Sueur- Hermel, The Fantastic Gustave Doré. Prestel, 2023. “Gustave’s Greatest Hits” is a sampling of newly refreshed images from all his illustration projects and works in other media in one splendidly produced volume.

Tim Powers, My Brother’s Keeper. Baen, 2023. A return to Powers’ beloved Romantic Era  where the Brontë family confronts werewolves and worse on the Yorkshire moors.

Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi:The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture. Cambridge, 2008. Richly illustrated examination of our Eucharistic beliefs and devotions, centered on the Feast of the Body of Christ.

Sandra Miesel is an American medievalist and writer.

 

Ines A. Murzaku:

My first book (2007), “Catholicism, Culture Conversion: The History of the Jesuits in Albania,” was recently translated into Albanian as Historia e Jezuiteve ne Shqiperi (1841-1946). Katolicizmi, Kultura, Kthimi ne Besim, published by the Society of Jesus Albania in 2023. I spent several months meticulously reviewing this translation, which was executed by a team of highly specialized individuals. The old Italian adage, “Traduttori, Traditori” (Translators Traitors), resonated with me as I scrutinized the translation for potential losses in meaning — akin to the English proverb, “something’s always lost in translation.” Fortunately, my thorough examination, facilitated by my proficiency in both languages, confirmed the translation team’s exemplary work. Their efforts reinforced my belief that translation is a dynamic tool, bridging similarities and differences across languages and cultures. I am pleased to report that the essence of my work was faithfully preserved in the Albanian version.

Another significant work I explored extensively since its release is “Listening to the East – Synodality in Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Church Traditions,” edited by the Institute for Ecumenical Studies of the Angelicum Pro Oriente Foundation, and published by the Libreria Editrice Vaticana in 2023, this book is an excellent resource for graduate courses. It delves into the concept of synodality in Ancient Oriental Churches, including the Antiochian Syriac Orthodox Church, Armenian Apostolic Church, Coptic, Ethiopian, Malankara Orthodox, and other Eastern Churches.

“Eastern Christianity in India; a history of the Syro-Malabar Church from the earliest time to the present day,” published in 1957, was instrumental in enhancing my understanding of the ongoing divisions within the Syro-Malabar Church. These divisions stem from a contentious issue regarding the enforced uniform liturgy, which contradicts the traditional practices.

In “Concezione Mistica dell’Antropologia,” Fernando Rielo (1923–2004), founder of the Idente Missionaries in 1959, discusses the development of the Motus Christi (Movement of Christ) initiative, aimed at enriching the spirituality of missionary life. My visit to their community in Rome during the summer left me impressed by the apostolic zeal of the missionaries.

As the 60th anniversary of Vatican II approaches in 2024, “The Reception of Vatican II,” edited by Matthew Lamb and Matthew Levering and published by Oxford in 2017, is an essential read. It provides insights into the council’s significant documents: Lumen Gentium, Unitatis Redintegratio, and Orientalium Ecclesiarium and others.

I also read two books related to Mother Teresa: “Madre Teresa un Pensiero per ogni Giorno dell’ Anno,” (2008) and “Il Mio Segreto Prego,” (2000). These works serve as primary sources for Mother Teresa’s writings.

Lastly, “Seton Hall University A History 1856-2006,” published by Rutgers University Press in 2023 and authored by my colleague Dermot Quinn, is a masterfully written history of Seton Hall University. Quinn’s work not only examines the university’s development in adherence to its founder’s vision but also portrays the individuals who shaped its identity. The book navigates Seton Hall’s journey through periods of prejudice, war, and transformation, highlighting its unique Catholic identity and inclusivity of other faith traditions.

Ines A. Murzaku is professor of Church history and director of the Catholic Studies Program at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

 

Eleanor Nicholson:

My Brother’s Keeper by Tim Powers. I was privileged to read this work as a manuscript and to review it for Catholic World Report. As I noted there: in addition to producing a thrilling and engaging novel, Powers has made a substantial contribution to Brontë studies with this book.

The Semi-Attached Couple by Emily Eden. This mid-Victorian novelist was new to me, and, while the other of her two successful works (The Semi-Detached House) didn’t strike me particularly, Eden’s depiction of the struggles of a newly-married couple moved me to tears.

One Poor Scruple by Josephine Ward. One of my all-time favorite novels by one of my all-time favorite novelists. I am thrilled that Catholic University Press has made Ward’s first novel more readily available.

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. Like G. K. Chesterton, I “prefer the novel in which one person does another person to death to the novel in which all the persons are feebly (and vainly) trying to get the others to come to life.” This year, I revisited Tey’s masterpiece to prepare to teach “The Victorian Detective” and “The Golden Age of Mystery Fiction” (two of my favorite courses). After leading students through Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, E. C. Bentley, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ronald Knox, tackling this masterpiece was especially rewarding. (Additionally, the self-reflective genre studies produced by this band of novelists represented a considerable portion of my reading, and always brings great joy). Warning: you’ll be compelled to launch a review study of the Wars of the Roses before you finish.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. I re-read this one with our older daughters. Marianne Dashwood is a perfect object lesson on the necessity of docility and prudence in maturing young women (not to mention having a bally sense of humor about oneself).

The Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens. Once again, I read to teach, and found new rewards and joy in the close readings and enthusiastic responses of young scholars. If you meet one of my students and inquire, they should tell you that the central theological belief of Dickens, the key to understanding both his social vision and his Christmas stories, is the Incarnation. (Incidentally, this is captured in Fred’s speech to Scrooge in Stave One).

God and Charles Dickens: Recovering the Christian Voice of a Classic Author by Gary L. Colledge. In that same vein, I was pleased with the insights in this work. Dickens was murky on more than one theological point, but Colledge has his finger on the pulse here.

A few children’s books deserve a mention here, as they’ve caught our children’s fancy without boring us to tears:

• The Holy Mass: On Earth As It Is In Heaven (Building Blocks of Faith Series): LEGO and catechesis, a brilliant combination!
• Saint Francis and Brother Duck and Saint Nicholas and the Mouse of Myra by Jan Stoeckl. Our eldest son has read them to tatters.
• The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. This is another “read on a loop” series in our house, and one which even the parents don’t mind hearing in audiobook form (especially with Del Roy as narrator).
• The Famous Five series by Enid Blyton. Sibling/cousin adventures of yesteryear, with sentence structure slightly superior to the Boxcar Children (which are classic but cloying, especially when read over and over and over and over…).

Eleanor Bourg Nicholson is a novelist, scholar, literature instructor for Homeschool Connections, and a homeschooling mother of five.

 

Carl E. Olson:

As mentioned in the introduction, I re-read quite a bit this past year, including passages and chapters from favorites by Frank Sheed, Fulton Sheen, Romano Guardini, John Henry Newman, C.S. Lewis, Jean Danielou, Joseph Ratzinger, John Paul II, and a few more besides. I will note just one of those specifically: Fides et Ratio by St. Pope John Paul II. I read it shortly after it was released and enjoyed it; but I appreciated it more—far more, I think—the second time around. We sometimes talk about “prophetic” works by popes (Humanae vitae, for example); this is one such book, made all the more so because it addresses directly numerous inter-related problems that have only grown (or metastasized) over the past quarter century.

I read many books published by Ignatius Press, and usually don’t mention them in this list. But I must recommend one of my favorite books of the past year: The Divine Project: Reflections on Creation and the Church, by Joseph Ratzinger, published a year ago. Here we find many of the great Ratzinger-ian themes—creation, salvation, liturgy, ecclesiology, etc.—presented in an accessible, even somewhat informal (the chapters were originally lectures given in 1985) style that makes this the place to start with Ratzinger.

Speaking of Ratzinger, Andrew Kaethler’s The Eschatological Person: Alexander Schmemann and Joseph Ratzinger in Dialogue (Cascade Books, 2022) is a lively and insightful comparison of two great theologians, showing how much they share—and where they depart from one another. (Look for my upcoming CWR interview with Dr. Kaethler about this fine book.)

Longtime CWR columnist James Kalb and renowned French political philosopher Pierre Manent address a number of identical and similar problems facing mankind in, respectively, The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church (Angelico, 2023) and The Religion of Humanity: The Illusion of Our Times (St. Augustine’s Press, 2022). Both men write with refreshing clarity and verve, but are also unflinching and provocative. I would describe them as “anti-Twitter” if Twitter hadn’t been changed to something called “X”.

The most interesting work of history I read this year was The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation (Eerdmans, 2023) by Daniel G. Hummel. I know a fair amount about “Rapture stuff,” having written a book about the topic, but Hummel’s book is filled with fascinating historical (and doctrinal) details (for example, the relationships and tensions between key dispensationalists) and describes the remarkable rise, wide-ranging influence, strange popularization, and complete collapse of the “Left Behind” belief system with an admirable calm and objectivity.

When dispensationalism was at its peak in the United States (1930s-1940s), the works of a British author named C.S. Lewis were being read, reviewed, and debated by Christians in the U.S.—both Catholic and Protestant. C.S. Lewis in America: Readings and Receptions, 1935-1947 (IVP, 2023) by noted Evangelical historian Mark Noll (with responses to each chapter by three other authors), will be of interest to Lewis readers. In the first chapter, titled “Surprise: Roman Catholics are Lewis’s first and most appreciative readers,” Noll notes that in 1943, Lewis’s now famous Screwtape Letters was positively reviewed in Commonweal, America, and Thought, all prominent Catholic publications.

Two new and excellent collections of poetry must be mentioned here: The Saint Mary’s Book of Christian Verse (Gracewing, 2022), chosen and introduced by Edward Short (and reviewed for CWR by James Matthew Wilson), and 100 Great Catholic Poems (Word on Fire, 2023), edited and with an introduction by Sally Read. Both are beautiful books, both are stuffed with poetic riches, both are clearly works of great care and devotion by editors Short and Read. So, I heartily recommend them both!

Finally, this year I finished teaching a Bible study at our parish on the Gospel of Matthew—the second such study of the first Gospel; the first one being in 2000. I’ve read the Gospel of Matthew numerous times since I was a young boy. Oddly enough, this past summer, while talking to my (dispensationalist) father about the afore-mentioned book by Hummel, my father asked me: “Have you read Matthew?” The question surprised me, but it was asked in good faith. “Yes,” I said, slightly annoyed, “in the original Greek.” I think that satisfied him. Next up, in January, we start (again, for the second time) the Epistles of John. I’ll make mention of that next year.

 

Jared Ortiz:

The Earthsea Cycle (Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, and Tehanu), Ursula Le Guin.  Very enjoyable and at times moving and wise.

Works of Mercy, Sally Thomas. How mercy draws us out of ourselves into the lives of others and the love of God.

Much Obliged, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse. Delight.

Interior Freedom, Jacques Philippe. Necessary reading these days, and likely all days.

The Divine Project, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. The hidden lectures of JR! These are expanded versions of the wonderful Genesis sermons.  Vintage Ratzinger.

Sonnez Les Matines, a Verse Play, by J.C. Scharl. Calvin, Ignatius of Loyola, and Rabeleis walk into a bar, literally.

The Good Death of Kate Monclair, by Daniel McInerny. A really wonderful first novel.

The Four Cardinal Virtues, by Joseph Pieper.  Ashamed to say I was this year old when I finally read this essential book.

Atonement, by Margaret Turek.  An important corrective to our often limited understandings of salvation.

Adrift, by Rhonda Ortiz. A very engaging, alternately very sweet and gritty, second novel in the Molly Chase series.

Baseball Before We Knew It, by David Block. Important reading for those interested in baseball and its pre-history.

Gilead, by Marilyn Robinson. A very wise and beautiful book that I often forgot was a novel and just read as spiritual reading.

Dr. Jared Ortiz is Professor of Religion at Hope College and author of You Made Us for Yourself: Creation in St Augustine’s Confessions (Fortress Press, 2016).

 

Rhonda Ortiz:

2023 could be described as the Year of Patrick O’Brian. My presence aboard this curious literary bark began as a fluke, but a providential and perhaps inevitable one. While working on my Age of Sail novel, Adrift, I had shared a passage to Facebook, making fun of my lubber self for spending an inordinate amount of time researching eighteenth-century inshore vessels in order to write two hundred words, all the while suspecting I had the facts mostly wrong. An acquaintance shared my post to the Patrick O’Brian Appreciation Society with, “This reminds me of Stephen Maturin!” My post gave the group a good laugh, and they invited me aboard as passenger with permission to ask as many questions as I liked. Fast-forward to today: I’m hooked on O’Brian, and most everything else seems stale by comparison.

I followed up last year’s read of Master and Commander with Post Captain (Aubrey/Maturin, Book Two) in March. While Master and Commander is an enjoyable romp, and not a middling or unthinking story by any stretch, Post Captain is a masterpiece: character-driven, serious in tone, and less bawdy, but without the loss of O’Brian’s characteristic wit. The third Aubrey/Maturin book, H.M.S. Surprise, is just delightful, and its most tragic scene—the death of Stephen Maturin’s young Indian friend, Dil—is deeply religious and Marian in nature. O’Brian usually holds religion at an ironic distance, but not here, where it matters. I finished The Mauritius Command (4) this fall, and Desolation Island (5) is in the queue. Now, if anyone wants to teach me to sail…

In non-O’Brian reading:

Works of Mercy, Sally Thomas. Works of Mercy features the most unlikely of heroines: the church cleaning lady. Works of Mercy is philosophic and beautifully written, yet also unpretentious, with recognizable characters and a recognizable world. No mid-century grotesques here; this is Jane Austen’s “bits of ivory,” the drama of ordinary life.

The Ghost Keeper, Natalie Morrill. One reviewer described this award-winning novel as “one long lyric poem, but never self-indulgent.” Like any story about the Holocaust, it delves into darkness, but it also dares to hope. The changes in narratorial point of view (first person, close third person, omniscient) interested me from a craft angle. The protagonist questions his reliability several times over the course of the novel. The war skews his vision of the whole, and the narratorial instability underscores this important theme.

Code Name Edelweiss, Stephanie Landsem. Code Name Edelweiss is based on the real-life story of the Nazis’ attempt to infiltrate Hollywood and the amateur spies who stopped them. The novel’s central characters are fictional, but several historical persons make their way into the novel, including Leon Lewis, the Jewish lawyer and former Army intelligence officer who formed the spy ring.

Wake of Malice, Eleanor Bourg Nicholson. Part Gothic novel, part murder mystery, Wake of Malice is the third book featuring Nicholson’s vampire-slaying, werewolf-rehabilitating, and now leprechaun zombie-dispatching Chestertonian Dominican friar, Fr. Thomas Edmund Gilroy. The story follows Irish newspaperman Hugh Buckley from his driftless life in London back to his native County Clare where, alongside Fr. Gilroy, he is forced to confront demons, real and figurative. The book releases Fall 2024 from Chrism Press.

Rhonda Ortiz is a lay Dominican, award-winning novelist, nonfiction writer, and founding editor emerita of Chrism Press. Find her online at rhondaortiz.com.

 

William L. Patenaude:

Losing our Dignity: How Secularized Medicine is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality by Charles C. Camosy. My mother suffered from Parkinson’s Disease. I was her full-time caregiver. And so, Losing our Dignity hit home. Anyone who has cared for a loved one knows that a significant part of the job is reminding certain medical professionals that the person in their care is indeed a person—a person who is loved. Dr. Camosy, Professor of Medical Humanities at the Creighton University School of Medicine, seamlessly weaves top-notch research and Christian principles. Published in 2021, the year my mom passed away, Losing our Dignity should be read widely throughout our struggling healthcare industry—and so perhaps help convert that industry into what it should be: a healthcare ministry.

Lost Providence by David Brussat. You don’t have to live in Providence, Rhode Island to appreciate this tale of a city that largely saved itself from “urban renewal.” And you don’t have to be a student of architecture. One need only be mindful of the war waged by so many against Western Civilization—not just against its traditions, but even its look and feel. Brussat, a retired editorial writer for The Providence Journal, spent decades chronicling the good and bad of Providence’s revival—including the reclamation of a few rivers. David is a friend and I share his way of thinking. And so, I will tell you what I frequently tell him: there’s a spiritual element to Lost Providence, which, while he does not explore it, I have found elsewhere in writers such as Christopher Dawson and Dietrich von Hildebrand, whom we come to next.

The Art of Living by Dietrich von Hildebrand. The Art of Living ties a bow around my first two best of books. The attacks on beauty and humanity chronicled in Lost Providence and the attacks on people examined in Losing our Dignity are the antitheses of all that Hildebrand champions in The Art of Living. In his words, “The responsible man knows that he is not ruled only by an impersonal world of values, but by a personal Judge, who is, at the same time the Sum of all values, and to whom he will have some day to render an account.”

Left to Tell by Immaculée Ilibagiza (with Steve Erwin). This autobiographical account of Ilibragiza’s survival of the Rwandan holocaust is brutal. And inspiring. The statistics tell part of the story—but only part. Ninety-one days hiding in a cramped bathroom with seven other women. A three-month genocide. One million Rwandan’s killed in brutal tribal attacks. Most of her family murdered. As for the other part of the story, the book’s subtitle highlights that: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust. Discovering God, yes, and thus the peace that comes with that discovery. And the ability to forgive. And the promise of Christian hope.

The Yes of Jesus Christ by Pope Benedict XVI. Speaking of hope, and because I can’t go too long without reading Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, I’ll end with this one—which I’ve read often. Because of its affirmation of Christian hope, The Yes of Jesus Christ is a book that I’d recommend for Christmas gifts—whether to the faithful or as a loving challenge for the lapsed in your life. “Love” Benedict XVI writes herein, “needs truth.” There are few better who write so lovingly of truth and so truthfully of love, which is why I hope you’ll add The Yes of Jesus Christ to your 2024 list of books to read and give.

William L. Patenaude MA, KHS has a master’s degree in theology, is a mechanical engineer, and is the author of the novel A Printer’s Choice.

 

Andrew Petiprin:

As co-founder and editor of the new Spe Salvi Institute, I have been reading a lot about Christianity and European society this year, and the two books that have completely bowled me over are Pierre Manent’s Beyond Radical Secularism (2015) and Rémi Brague’s Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization (1992). Manent’s analysis of French society after the Charlie Hebdo massacre but just before the Middle Eastern migrant crisis is revealing. Even “secular” societies, he argues, have only recently become non-Christian or anti-Christian secular societies. The West must therefore reclaim the old marks of faith to survive. To wit, Brague’s Eccentric Culture argues that Europe is not confined to geography or demography, but has always been a channel through which the values of Greek, Jewish, and ultimately Roman antiquity have converged to bring us Christianity as culture. Indeed, there is little argument that Europe represents something of a Platonic form of culture itself. However, Europe and Christianity must constantly propose themselves anew, and both rise or fall together with the success or failure of the endeavor.

As host of the Ignatius Press Podcast, I have had the privilege to read some of the best new books from Ignatius authors this year. I was riveted by the Memoirs of Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, sometime primate of Hungary, who faced persecution from Communists, Nazis, and then Communists again. The book’s introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney provides context for situating this great churchman amid world events. I also loved Jeremy Christiansen’s From the Susquehanna to the Tiber, which is a cut above in the perennially crowded field of conversion testimony books. Jeremy’s unique tale involves, among other things, a dramatic change of underwear. The Epilogue made me jump for joy (not about the underwear).

I was edified in various ways by Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers’ most welcome contribution to ongoing debates about race and faith in his new book Building a Civilization of Love: A Catholic Response to Racism. Deacon Harold displays serious theological acumen in engaging with the academic arguments of Critical Race Theory and Black Liberation Theology, taking care to explain to non-experts in plain terms. He is courageous too, never minimizing racism as a grave sin that we must all face. But also, he is clear that racism is something God can heal. In the end, Deacon Harold shows us his tender pastor’s heart that longs for the mind of Christ among all people. A must-read as we all navigate treacherous cultural waters.

Finally, a novel. If you enjoy dystopian literature in the vein of Orwell and Huxley, as I do, I encourage you to acquire a copy of Exogenesis by Peco Gaskovski. Not only does the author shine light on the immoral excesses of scientism, but he does so with a sophisticated touch. Like pulling someone out of the Matrix, it can be painful to see all at once how dehumanized we have become. Gaskovksi avoids the heavy hand, showing us a horrifying, not-too-distant future that nonetheless cannot be easily dismissed as “conspiracy.” He creates relatable characters and avoids intricate world-building that would appeal only to a niche audience. Likewise, Exogenesis is encouraging for those of us hoping to see a renewal of Christian art that is not hemmed in by “Christian” marketing labels. As a film critic, I see huge potential for Exogenesis on the big screen. Pick the book up now to so you can say you knew it before the story went mainstream.

Andrew Petiprin is a columnist at Catholic World Report and host of the Ignatius Press Podcast, as well as Founder and Editor at the Spe Salvi Institute.

 

S.Kirk Pierzchala:

I read nearly forty books over the last 12 months! Here are three that really stood out to me for their thought-provoking subject matter and great craftsmanship.

Our Lady of the Artilects, by Andrew Gillsmith: Evoking both Benson’s The Lord of the World and Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, Gillsmith’s religious thriller does a solid job of balancing action-adventure elements with deeply important questions about the nature of the human soul and potential risks of advanced AI technology.

The Hand of God, by Yuval Kordov: This gritty, post-apocalyptic adventure tale owes much to the Mad Max films. Mostly set five hundred years in the future, it depicts a world of survivors struggling under the thumb of raging demons and severe religious cults. While it’s unclear where the author’s philosophy will ultimately lead this trilogy, the ride is expertly crafted and entertaining.

While the World Turns, by K.M. O’Neill: Another view of humanity’s bleak, post-apocalyptic future, but this one focuses on the nature of faith, sacrifice and suffering. O’Neill is a remarkably talented young writer who has transmuted universal themes of pain and loss into an exquisite work of haunting beauty.

S .Kirk Pierzchala is a lay Dominican and novelist living in the Pacific Northwest.

 

Matthew Ramage:

What is Christianity? The Last Writings, Pope Benedict XVI. What a beautiful surprise it was to know that we would be able to hear the voice of our beloved Benedict one last time after his passing into eternal life! These works penned during retirement were a joy to read. There is not much here that is brand new. Even so, it was refreshing to see how the emeritus pontiff chose to frame things as he revisited his most central concerns one last time in the autumn of life. Moreover, the very choice of topics that the emeritus pontiff pursued in his final years made for a powerful revelation of what he held dearest to his heart.

Who Believes Is Not Alone: My Life Beside Benedict XVI, Archbishop Georg Gänswein. This was well worth my time. Actually, I’ll admit that I need to spend a little more time with it as I have not yet finished this book. But here is a man who arguably knew Benedict better than any other living person. My favorite parts are where we get to hear first-hand what the emeritus pontiff was concerned with during his final years and how he reacted to various teachings and actions on the part of our present pontiff. Above all, I appreciated the transcribed snippets from Benedict’s final “private” homilies that he delivered shortly before losing the ability to speak. With these, we are offered perhaps the best window imaginable into the beauty of Benedict’s humble soul and his undying commitment to the pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty.

Confession of a Catholic Worker: Our Moment of Christian Witness, Larry Chapp. In an age when ecclesial discourse is dominated by various forms of extremism, Larry is a welcome voice of sanity. If you’re looking for a balanced perspective on the Church but have not read Chapp, put these essays near the top of your reading list.

Theistic Evolution: A Contemporary Aristotelian-Thomistic Perspective, Mariusz Tabaczek. This is an academic work and not intended for your average Catholic in the pew. However, for anyone out there who appreciates the virtues of Thomism, I can think of no better source for precise elucidations of thorny issues at the intersection of evolutionary biology and Catholic thought.

The Politics of the Real, David C. Schindler. Even as I am generally a fan of Schindler’s work, I was initially skeptical about this volume. By the end, however, I was convinced that much of his analysis is spot on. I am pretty sure that my view of the Constitution is more positive than Schindler’s, but the exercise of thinking through some problematic premises underlying the governance of liberal nations was worthwhile. Moreover, his criticisms of integralism were insightful and finally put into words a number of serious concerns that I have long harbored about that political philosophy.

A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein. This is not a Catholic book but rather a book that Catholics need to read. The premise: we need to understand the original context in which humans arose on this planet in order to address the greatest challenges of the present time. By way of a teaser, here’s their diagnosis of our present situation: “Some of the most fundamental truths—like the fact of two sexes—are increasingly dismissed as lies… We are generating new problems at a new and accelerating rate, and it is making us sick—physically, psychologically, socially, and environmentally.”

Matthew Ramage is a professor of theology and co-director of the Center for Integral Ecology at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.

 

Charles Russo:

In what may strike some, even many, as an unlikely choice of a favorite book for a Catholic to re-read for pleasure, as opposed to being for prayer as in the Bible, or work, I recommend Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel The Last Temptation of Christ. Regarded as scandalous and condemned by the Greek Orthodox Church, while praised by others, when it was first published, The Last Temptation was translated to English in 1960.

Unlike its controversial, even dreadful, 1988 movie version, which cheaply sensationalized Christ’s last temptation as He died on the cross, namely that He forsake His mission as savior to run off and make a life, including children and grandchildren, with Mary of Magdala, I find the book to be inspirational and thought-provoking. Based on Mark’s Gospel, The Last Temptation portrays a human Jesus along with his Apostles and others, not some a saccharine holy card mystic or plastic saint.

Jesus was, and remains, truly God and man. Yet, The Last Temptation unfortunately, and inaccurately, portrays Jesus in all-too flawed and weak man full of doubts and fears. Sadly, this presentation is wildly at odds with the Jesus in the Gospel based on remembrances from those who knew Him.

As truly human, though, Jesus may well have experienced temptation. If readers can put aside the unfortunate, and unnecessary, gratuitous graphic, descriptions of sex, especially in the movie, though the novel offers a powerful message about staying faithful to one’s mission. because despite its imperfections it reminds readers that unlike us, Jesus resisted temptation by suffering and dying for our sins. Instead of giving in, Jesus remained faithful. In fact, as a final display of his resistance to the evil of Satan in His commitment to our salvation, in the closing lines of the novel, as in the Gospels, Jesus opened His eyes on the cross and cried that “It is accomplished,” dying for our salvation while opening the doors to eternal salvation for those who follow in His words.

The Last Temptation is my favorite novel to read because, its shortcomings aside, it offers challenging food in its message of hope, that Catholics and all believers, must have strength to persevere in the face of constant temptation. I readily concede that The Last Temptation may not be a book for everyone. Even so, those willing to consider stepping outside of their comfort zones by taking the time to read it will be in for a thoughtful surprise in learning to resist temptation and staying faithful to one’s commitments just as Jesus did by dying on the cross for all.

Charles J. Russo, M.Div., J.D., Ed.D., is Professor of Law in the School of Law at the University of Dayton, OH.

 

Sean Salai:

For those of us who admire and love a good essay, the death of Jesuit Father James Schall a few years ago dealt a great blow to English prose. Since I’ve already read the collected works of Montaigne and the collected newspaper columns of late Mike Royko, it can be challenging to find a truly provocative essay collection. Fortunately, I completed one this year.

Bishop Robert Barron’s collection Renewing Our Hope: Essays on the New Evangelization (2020, CUA Press) offers a timely series of reflections on the latest theological wisdom about sharing the faith with others in our contentious age—and it tops my list of the best books I read this year.

Much as Schall mixed references to Charlie Brown comics with Aquinas and Augustine in his masterful essays, Barron applies pop culture to the gospels. His touch isn’t quite so whimsical and light as Schall, and his preference for violent adult films from past decades (like The Shawshank Redemption and Jesus of Montreal) makes him a bit less widely accessible. But his insight is always challenging and interesting to follow, even when you don’t share his love of Quentin Tarantino and other filmmakers.

More interesting to me as a writer and academic in this book is the distillation of Barron’s wide reading and deep learning on several topics; it’s a master seminary class for those who can’t attend seminary or study theology formally. Barron is one of the most original popular synthesizers of theological thought you will find on the American scene today, and this book cements that reputation.

Standout passages in this book include an update of faith and science disputations that looks at new proofs of God’s existence through the lens of thinkers like the Jesuit philosopher Fr. Robert Spitzer. Barron also tackles the heavy but worthwhile book The Mind of Pope Francis, offering an accessible summary of the tome—which explains the Latin American sources of the pope’s intellectual formation—for those who won’t shell out money to purchase and read it. Finally, the bishop recaps his trademark argument that beauty is a better starting point than truth for evangelization today.

As Schall might say, this is “good stuff,” an easy way of entering serious conversations about faith from a Catholic perspective. As someone who is not an avid reader of Barron, I found this to be a helpful précis of his thought—and I found myself thinking more deeply about many of his thoughts on how to evangelize on today’s culture.

Dr. Sean Salai, D.Min is the culture reporter at The Washington Times and a pastoral theologian. He is the author or editor of several books on Pope Francis and Ignatian spirituality.

 

Fr. George E. Schultze, SJ:

Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta. I know the Sisters at Pacifica (CA), Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Gaza, and I read the book before directing the Near East superiors’ retreat in Rmeimeen, Jordan. Amid darkness, we can all bring the light of Jesus’s love to others. Jesus thirsts for us, we thirst for Him. I Thirst. Smile, especially in the dim. A beautiful and well-lived life.

Science at the Doorstep of God and Science at the Doorstep of Christ. Thank you, Fr. Spitzer and Ignatius Press. We are living in a time that, given the advances in science, it is almost impossible not to believe. Science and logic point to the Creator and Jesus as the Lord. We fall into doubt and sin when we fail to follow the Holy Spirit. Essential for Catholic schools and home-schooling families—anyone who thinks.

The Divine Project: Reflections on Creation and the Church, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. A 1985 lecture that undoes today’s wokeism. “By reducing things to the quantitative…reduction of good and evil to weighing of consequences…we are essentially abandoning the whole concept of moral right and wrong.” Bingo, again!

A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, Victor Davis Hanson. Replacing open field battles that used phalanxes, terrorism and sieges took hold and combatants came to kill both insurrectionists and innocent people. Wartime plagues can end a civilization “anywhere and at any time.” Athen’s location and “navy” were its initial strength, but the Spartans later tapped Persian wealth to build their warships (the financing of war). Hanson concludes that “fighting cannot end the conflict [of war] unless [the parties] address why one party chose to go to war in the first place.” For Thucydides, war is always a tragedy, but the “disturbing message…is that discussions follow the sway of the battlefield.” Hanson, a farmer and realist, writes that the Spartans at the beginning of the war failed to destroy Athenian olive trees, vines, and grain with fire, chopping, and digging. “A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a bud shall blossom. The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him…” Our Christian hope is in the Lord.

In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist: A Novel, Ruchama King Feureman. This is an engaging book for those who have visited Jerusalem or plan to visit. The three principal characters are a semi-crippled Muslim who works on the Temple Mount, a middle-aged American man who works for a rabbi and desires a wife, and a free-thinking American Jewish woman who falls for him. The plot makes visible the city’s religious and cultural tensions through the discovery of a valuable artifact, the criminal implications of possessing it, and the spiritual healing that occurs in each of the character’s lives.

Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, Vivek Ramaswamy. Corporate America and higher education have set today’s values for US society, leading to tribalism. Americans are therefore now more focused on what divides them than on what unites them. “Stakeholder capitalism” that bows to the drumbeat of social activists is demanding Americans accept wrongheaded, divisive social causes like transgenderism. Think of Budweiser and Disney. The challenge is to raise up and protect a common American identity. One intriguing proposal is mandating a high school summer of civic service to help foster American identity.

Father George E. Schultze, SJ is a spiritual director at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem and the Latin Patriarchal Seminary in Beit Jala.

 

 

Monica Seeley:

My “best books” usually starts with a Christmas book-buying frenzy, and last Christmas was no exception, as we added a number of classics and some literary journals to our already groaning shelves. It’s a delight to watch my children’s taste in books evolve, and with more frequency as they grow older, the books they get as Christmas presents find their way to my bedside table.

Last Christmas, one of my sons was determined that his sister should read Whittaker Chambers’ classic, Witness, which had been on my bucket list as well.  I was a little taken aback at the size of the book, but thankfully, my daughter is a speed reader—she polished off the 700+ page volume in less than a week, then passed it on to me.

It took me considerably longer to work my way through Witness. As I did so, the dumpy little figure of Whittaker Chambers, unassuming in its shabby black suit, came to life for me.

Chambers’ testimony ultimately convicted the urbane, well-spoken Alger Hiss and shone a light on a Communist infiltration of almost unimaginable scope. The Hiss trial makes for riveting reading, and the calculated Marxist manipulation of the American public through the media, dating back to the 1920s, is revealing and very current. Chambers’ life, from his eccentric, dysfunctional childhood, to his years in the underground, his break with Communism and the years in which he rebuilt his life, to the trial and time beyond, are a fascinating read.

But what made this book unforgettable for me was Chambers’ Christian faith (he was a Quaker), which is inseparable from his break with Communism and his subsequent witness. Just as unforgettable were the poignant, homely details centering on Chambers’ wife, his children, and the family farm, with its apple orchard and “little woods of white pine and oak,” a world away from Washington and from Time Magazine’s bustling New York office. The book begins with Chambers, writing at the kitchen table, and ends with the evening stars glittering over the farm as he returns home after a long day.

Leafing through the book once more in search of quotes—there are so many memorable passages I didn’t know which to choose—I found, almost exactly half way, in the chapter called “The Division Point,” (p 386), that these details of faith and home are no accident, but purposely central to the book, as they are to Chambers’ life: “In the end, the only memorable stories, like the only memorable experiences, are religious and moral. They give men the heart to suffer the ordeal of life that perpetually rends them between its beauty and its terror.”

My re-read this year was Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy. Years ago, when my husband and I were in college, we read the memoir of love and conversion at Oxford, and were entranced and inspired by it. We had Oxford dreams of our own, and loved C.S. Lewis, whose wisdom and personal story are interwoven with the story of Vanauken and his wife Davy. We wrote the author, who was at the time teaching at Lynchburg College, musing why two midwestern kids should feel such a pull to England. He wrote back, a kindly postcard, explaining that our feelings were natural because England is still the mother country for us Americans.

Earlier this year, touched by a family tragedy, I was surprised to find myself praying over and over for mercy rather than for consolation. My thoughts turned to Vanauken’s book, and I opened it again, wondering if it would stand the test of time. Our world has changed dramatically since I first read it—but its story of human love, and of divine love—God’s severe mercy—is timeless.

This list wouldn’t be complete without a mention of Christy Wall’s book The Greatest Battle. I picked up the book one afternoon this summer and found myself reading through the night.  At the time, I thought what a perfect read it would be for Advent. The book tells the story of a horrific accident that left Wall’s brilliant, promising son Franz paralyzed. But before it can tell that story, it is the story of how God led Wall and her family to a faith that saw suffering as a gift to be offered for the salvation of souls. The story begins the day after Thanksgiving and ends on the Solemnity of Mary. Walking through Advent with her son as he fights for his life, Wall turns their shared anguish into a beautiful meditation on the Incarnation.

Monica Seeley writes from Ventura, California, where she raises children and tolerates chickens.

 

Russell Shaw:

There are four titles on my best books list this year: Caryll Houselander: Divine Eccentric by Maisie Ward, ‘The World and the Person’ and Other Writings by Romano Guardini, The Wings of the Dove by Henry James, and Typhoon by Joseph Conrad.

Maisie Ward knew what she was talking about in calling her friend Caryll Houselander a “divine eccentric.” As Ward’s fine biography makes clear, Houselander’s life had been troubled and disorderly before she discovered the gift that made her perhaps the finest English language spiritual writer of the twentieth century. She also had an extraordinary therapeutic ability to help others as troubled as she had been. A notable plus of the book is the inclusion of many of her finely written letters. Thanks to Cluny Media for bringing this title back into print.

And thanks also to Regnery Gateway for bringing together several of Romano Guardini’s otherwise unavailable titles in one oversized volume. Guardini was very likely the most important Catholic theologian of the immediate pre-Vatican II years, as well as a man of broad culture and an excellent writer. This collection includes highly rewarding discussions of virtues, Sacred Scripture, the psalms, the Church, and the nature of the human person as viewed by a thinker of high intelligence and deep spirituality.

The Wings of the Dove is one of Henry James’s late novels, and will therefore not be to everyone’s taste. But it shows James in top form doing what he does best—which is what one might call the minute analysis of sensibility. The novel is interesting, too, for the circumstance that the central character is a Catholic woman, as well as for other religious elements. I do not suggest James was himself inching toward religious conversion, but as this and other of his books make clear, there was something about the Catholic Church that he found intriguing.

Typhoon is too long to be a short story and too short to be a novel; I suppose that qualifies it as a novella. But however that may be, Conrad here provides the finest extended piece of descriptive narrative that I have ever read. Its account of a rusty old tub—with a taciturn captain, a half-crazy first mate, and a crowd of Chinese laborers in the hold desperate to get out, and ship and all of them in the grip of a monstrous storm doing its best to send the whole lot to the bottom—is a genuinely gripping piece of writing that you won’t soon forget.

Russell Shaw is the author of more than 20 books.

 

Piers Shepherd:

In the last few years, Anthony Trollope has become one of my favorite Victorian novelists. This year I read Doctor Thorne, the third of Trollope’s famous Barset novels, set in the fictional English county of Barsetshire. Though it is something of a departure from the first two novels in the series, The Warden and Barchester Towers, Trollope’s ability to combine the most serious themes and commentary with a large dose of humor is still very much in evidence.

I Believed: The Autobiography of a Former British Communist by Douglas Hyde is the story of its author’s journey from communism to Catholicism. Published in 1950, the book chronicles Hyde´s 20 years as a leading figure in the Communist Party of Great Britain, the communist activities during the Spanish Civil War and Second World War and Hyde´s gradual disillusion with communism and entry into the Church. This is a truly valuable book, primarily because of its insider’s view of one of the major political phenomena of the 20th century.

Inquisition by Edward Peters is a scholarly, well-researched and highly readable history of the Inquisition from its beginnings in combating the Albigensian heresy to its Spanish and Portuguese manifestations and its activities in Italy, the Americas, Goa and elsewhere. Peters also chronicles the creation of the Black Legend surrounding the famous tribunal through pamphlets and powerful literature and art. With a detailed annotated bibliography and vivid illustrations, this surely ranks as one of the best books on its subject.

Documents of the Christian Church, Selected and Edited by Henry Bettenson. Though now over 60 years old this guide to the major documents of Christian history is still a valuable resource. It contains in whole or in part writings of the Church Fathers, documents from Church councils, documents relating to the medieval Church such as Henry II´s Constitutions of Clarendon and the Church clauses of Magna Carta, writings of the Protestant reformers, extracts from papal encyclicals and interdicts and much more.

Honorable mentions should also be given to two books by Hilaire Belloc, The Crusades: The World’s Debate and James II. Belloc’s histories have been much criticized but are great fun to read and provide basic introductions to historical subjects that can later inspire deeper reading. Also, The History of England Volume 1: Foundations by Peter Ackroyd is an absorbing English history packed with fascinating details and written with a great feeling for the country.

Piers Shepherd is a freelance writer currently based in Colombia.

 

Edward Short:

The best book I read this year was Bishop Jean Laffitte’s Christ: The Destiny of the Human Person (Gracewing), which sets out the pro-life and pro-family priorities that had been at the heart of the Pontifical Academy of Life before the present pope handed it off to his friend, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, who recently suggested, despite the usual belated disavowals, that if the Church’s views on capital punishment could change, so, too, could those on euthanasia. Laffitte’s reaffirmation of the Church’s moral teachings is of an unambiguous clarity: “The refusal of death, when it puts an end to a happy life, and, on the other hand, the pursuit of death when existence seems to be absurd, mark the attitude of people who reject or who have forgotten their fundamental relationship with God.” In his preface, the Most Rev. Anthony Fisher, OP sums up the book by describing it as “an encounter with Christ… an embodiment of the thesis of William of St Thierry: ‘Love of truth drives us from the world (to God) and the truth of love drives us back again.’” To put the pro-life fight in perspective, Laffitte reminds his readers that it was Voltaire who first deployed the weapon of “ideological tolerance” to charge the Church with intolerance, an “accusation,” which “has been continually repeated up to our own day.” It certainly gave Edward Gibbon the anti-Christian thesis of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), in which tolerant polytheistic Rome is toppled by intolerant monotheistic Christianity. As Laffitte shows, the object of this travesty of tolerance has always been to undermine not only the Church’s authority but her guardianship of conscience. Thus, the attack on conscience is of “an essentially political, not of a moral nature” (Lafitte’s italics), nothing advancing the tyranny of those who cannot abide conscience more effectively than a tolerance that denies the objectivity of truth—the very lifeblood of conscience. Still, the mounting assaults on life, conscience and the family notwithstanding, Laffitte is the reverse of defeatist: his book is an exuberant call to arms. “To abandon our apostolate,” he says, “would be to disable ourselves from honoring the gift of the Saviour, His glorious Cross” and the faithful shall never do that.

Another commendable book from Gracewing is Gillian Grute’s Heavenly Embroidery: Exiles, Embroidery, Patronage, which nicely attests to the Church’s delight in holy craftsmanship. Lavishly illustrated and smartly produced, it is well-researched and admirably groundbreaking. When A.W.N. Pugin gave the Sisters of the Poor Child in Aix La Chapelle a gift of art prints in 1844, the sisters set up an embroidery workshop to turn them to account, while continuing to care for unwanted children. The work they made out of Pugin’s designs proved wildly popular and inaugurated a tradition of devout needlework that transformed the art of vestment and mitre-making for over a hundred years.

Over the past year, I read a good deal of Chekhov, the best of bedside authors, whose love of neighbor will always recommend him to Catholic readers. I also reread Ruskin’s Praeterita (1885-9) and Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet (1883), both of which seemed as good as ever. In addition, I dove into John Ruskin: Selected Writings edited by Richard Landsdown (Oxford), who makes a superb selection of a vast, uneven body of work. I also enjoyed Peter Gilliver’s The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford), Peter Brown’s Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton), Robert Tombs’ This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe (Allen Lane) and Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (William Collins).

Lastly, I should tout the welcome reprint of Josephine Ward’s 1899 novel One Poor Scruple, with an introduction by Bonnie Lander Johnson and Julia Meszaros (Catholic University of America Press). Josephine was the daughter of Newman’s good friend and counselor, James Hope-Scott, the wife of Wilfrid Ward and the mother of Maisie Ward—but also, as this book shows, a splendid novelist. As the editors say in their introduction, one question the novel seeks to answer is one that must preoccupy us all, “How far into the world can a Catholic wander, how many fruits can be enjoyed, before the happiness he pursues becomes separated from good and for this reason poses grave moral danger?”

Edward Short is the author of What The Bells Sang: Essays and Reviews, which Churchill’s biographer Andrew Roberts, called “wise,” “beautiful” and “brave.”

 

Carl R. Trueman:

In terms of fiction, this year’s highlights for me have been books that I have re-read. For fun, that was Frank Herbert’s Dune. I first read that in 1984, in an attempt to understand David Lynch’s incomprehensible movie. I did so again this year in light of the imminent arrival of Dune II in the cinemas. On a more serious level, I started to reread all of Dostoevski’s great novels. I finished The Idiot, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, with Demons coming early in 2024. I teach a course at Grove that looks at nineteenth-century literature that addresses religious themes and I have found that the students (most of them Christians) find the chapters ‘Rebellion’ and (of course) ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ from The Brothers Karamazov to raise many of the questions they wrestle with today. Albert Camus was certainly right to declare Dostoevski and not Marx the great prophet of his time.

This also points toward one of my favorite new books of the year: Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Belknap Harvard). Morson paints a fascinating picture of Russian literature and provides a brilliant and clear account of its major themes. Russia really had no literature until late in the eighteenth century. By the start of the twentieth, it already boasted names such as Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Tolstoy and Chekhov. The twentieth was no less rich, despite (or perhaps because) of the tragic history of the Soviet Union, with Bely, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn, and Grossman among others all making signal contributions. What Morson does is provide the reader with a broad social, cultural, literary and philosophical framework understanding the great works of Russian literature. Anyone who reads his book will find their subsequent reading of Russian authors to be dramatically deepened.

My other book of the year is Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress. Harrington is a fascinating figure—one of a growing number of self-styled reactionary feminists who are pushing back against the trendy pieties of our day. They see the sexual revolution as bad news, women’s bodies as vital to the definition of what it means to be a woman, and attempts to erase the differences between men and women as at best wrongheaded, at worst dehumanizing. Harrington also writes beautifully. Like her compatriot, Louise Perry, she says so many things that Christians will find helpful in thinking through the sexual and gender chaos of our current moment.

The one question I have for Harrington—and what makes her and others such as Perry figures to watch over the next few years—is whether she can hold her positions without having to commit at some point to Christianity. She already writes sympathetically about the faith. Perhaps 2024 will bring interesting developments in that area.

Carl Trueman teaches humanities at Grove City College in Pennsylvania and is the author of several books, including The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.

 

John Tuttle:

This year’s been one of the busiest for me. As a result, my reading list is quite short. But I can say my fiancée and I have been enjoying a few fine devotionals during this liturgical season leading up to Christmastime. They are the 2023 Magnificat Advent Companion and (one which I personally revisit almost yearly) Advent and Christmas Wisdom from G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton is as jovial as our modern imaginings of Santa Claus and as rigorous in the pursuit of justice as the real St. Nick was. He makes for an excellent read—even in small doses.

Other outstanding spiritual reading which is worth mentioning would include Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard’s Soul of the Apostolate, a book assigned for faculty summer reading at the Catholic school I work at. However, I’m behind and only nearly half-way through. Its focus is on cultivating the interior life, a real relationship with Jesus, and how—if you don’t have this—you as an apostle of Christ fail to grasp the point of it all. In fact, where such an interior life is nonexistent, the person who seems to be laboring for Christ is laboring for himself and not relying on God’s graces. It’s a challenging idea to think that even failures in teaching or evangelizing on our part could be put to good use by God. But that’s the truth. While we might not see the fruits of our labors, God can use our efforts to bear fruit further down the road. We should not become discouraged when our plans don’t go the way we want.

For nonfiction, Flags of Our Fathers by John Bradley and Ron Powers is at the absolute top of the list. It is among my favorite non-fiction works, right up there with John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Like Hersey’s influential book, Bradley’s novel-like historical account deals with WWII and its aftermath. In Hiroshima, we see the devastation brought on by the immoral use of the atomic bomb. In Flags of Our Fathers, we get to know the lives of the men immortalized in the iconic photo “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” including their beliefs, struggles, dreams, and faith lives. We also see the atrocities against Chinese civilians and U.S. soldiers and corpsmen committed by the Imperial Japanese Army, who were often motivated by a perverted version of Bushido, or the “Way of the Warrior.” Many of the American boys in the famed photograph were raised in God-fearing homes that kept a Bible as one of the treasured family belongings. John Bradley, fondly remembered as “Doc” by his Marine peers, is one of the flagraisers who made it off Iwo Jima alive; he was also the father of the book’s author. John Bradley often attended daily Mass in training camp. And, as his wife later recalled, after the battle, John prayed every night: “Blessed Mother, please help us so everything turns out all right.” He confessed, somewhat shyly, that this was a prayer he said on Iwo Jima. While not explicitly Catholic, Flags of Our Fathers shows the faith of a virtuous man who did not see himself as a hero. The real heroes had given their blood, their very lives.

For fiction, I recommend White Fang. Not as popular as Jack London’s Call of the Wild, it’s easily twice as good of a novel. It is a good action-adventure story, gripping straight from the beginning, something the author fails to accomplish in the first pages of Call. It’s not just a good dog book; it’s a great American novel.

John Tuttle has a BA in journalism & mass communications and theology from Benedictine College.

 

Joseph Tuttle:

This year I have delved further into the writings of G.K. Chesterton. I was previously acquainted with much of his fiction but decided to dive into his non-fiction. My father, a convert to the Catholic Faith and a huge fan of Chesterton, has always told me that if I were ever to read any books by Chesterton to read Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man; both of which I completed this year. In my opinion, these texts should be read back-to-back and always together. In his typical wit and wisdom, Chesterton offers a superb defense of Christendom. After completing both texts I found myself unable to argue with Chesterton. His logic and common sense were so simple yet so astounding that I could not but agree with his assertions. I find this to be the case with most readers of Chesterton. Aside from these, I read some of his other classic works: Eugenics and Other Evils, The Superstition of Divorce, Lepanto, and The Catholic Church and Conversion.

I am afraid that during this year I have been rather negligent in my reading of fiction with the exception of Louis de Wohl’s The Spear which I read during Holy Week. It is an intriguing novel about St. Longinus, the Roman soldier who pierced the side of Christ. De Wohl is a masterful writer and weaves in tradition, historical detail, and episodes found in the Gospel narratives to bring life to his text.

I was finally able to complete The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien just in time for a new edition, with even more letters, to be released this year. (I know what I’ll be reading in 2024!) This collection of letters lets the reader see the truly human and Catholic author behind The Lord of the Rings. His faith is central to his life and it clearly comes across in his letters whether he is talking about the sacraments or simply mentioning the church at which he attended Mass.

Josef Pieper’s fantastic essay Leisure: The Basis of Culture also found its way into my reading itinerary this year. His thesis is essentially this: the core of leisure is celebration or worship. The purpose of this worship is to become adopted sons and daughters of God through the liturgy. He writes to the point and very succinctly—a quality I appreciate among philosophers and one that is quite rare.

I would be remiss if I did not mention some of the books I read from Fulton Sheen: Characters of the Passion and Peace of Soul as well as a transcribed retreat given by the archbishop on St. Therese of Lisieux, Archbishop Sheen’s St. Therese: A Treasured Love Story. Characters of the Passion is a short read but one I would recommend for Holy Week or possibly during the Triduum. Sheen masterfully treats different perspectives of the Passion of Christ from Judas and St. Peter to Pilate and Claudia.

I also read Benedict XVI’s final collection of writings from Ignatius Press: What is Christianity? It contains a conglomeration of his writings that came about after his retirement from the Papal office. It shows that even while his body was breaking down his mind was still as sharp as ever with deep theological insights into the liturgy, interreligious dialogue, and the priesthood. Another excellent read on the priesthood this year was from a close friend of Benedict XVI, Robert Cardinal Sarah: At the Service of Truth: Priesthood and Ascetic Life.

Joseph Tuttle is the author of An Hour with Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (Ligouri, 2021). He has a B.A. in theology from Benedictine College.

 

George Weigel:

Despite occasionally purplish prose and some excessive technical detail, I thoroughly enjoyed Mark Helprin’s The Oceans and the Stars: A Sea Story, a War Story, a Love Story. The protagonist, a non-woke, scholar-warrior and Navy captain, is an entirely admirable 21st century hero. And how can you not like an author who describes a presidential candidate in these terms: “The press went crazy. He was a prospective president who said little; who had never issued a tweet; who projected seriousness, depth, and dignity. It was a nearly unbelievable change, in that he was neither infantile nor senile, nor a crook, narcissist, or idiot”?

Old Boys got me (re)reading Charles McCarry (author of the greatest espionage novel ever written, The Tears of Autumn) and thereby helped save my sanity during Synod-2023.

And speaking of that exercise in ecclesiastical self-referentiality, it would have been a much more thoughtful occasion if its working document had been Bishop Robert Barron’s Light from Light: A Theological Reflection on the Nicene Creed.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center and is the author of over twenty books.

 

Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap.:
I very much appreciated David Fegerberg’s Liturgical Theology. He shows that we not only come to know all the sacred mysteries that are enacted in the liturgy (Trinity, Incarnation, cross, resurrection, and Parousia), but that we also, most importantly, come into communion with the mysteries that are enacted. The past is made present by which we come to enter into the future—the eschatological fulfillment. Fegerberg’s book is not always easy to read, for he can, at times, express himself in a rather complex fashion. At other times, the liturgy, and the mysteries they embody, are rendered in a very beautiful manner.

I wrote a lengthy essay this past year on Gregory Palamas, wherein I critiqued his bizarre distinction between God’s essence (the manner in which he exists in himself) and his energies (the manner in which relates to finite reality and human beings). Having done so, I discovered that James Likoudis’s had just published a book on Gregory, Unpacking Palamism: A Catholic Critique. Likoudis does a marvelous job in demonstrating that Palamas’s thought is neither founded upon biblical revelation nor on the Greek and Latin theological traditions. If you are interested in Gregory Palamas’s thought, which I hope you are not, Likoudis would be a great place to start—after my article, which is digitally published in the International Journal of Systematic Theology.

Over many years, I have been fascinated by the Habsburg dynasty. There seemed to me to be an integrity about the Habsburgs that exceeded their desire to obtain power, and so to rule over a vast territory. With these personal presuppositions in mind, I read Martyn Rady’s book, The Habsburgs: To Rule the World. I was not disappointed. Rady’s history of the Habsburgs, both the Spanish and the Hungarian and Austrian lineage, not only tells of their conquests and their manner of governing, but also their desire to form those over whom they ruled. The Habsburgs, most of then, wanted to establish, by way of example and through what they fostered, a Catholic kingdom, and so a Catholic culture. This furtherance of all things Catholic is seen in the music, the literature, the art, and the architecture they promoted and sometimes financially sponsored. The negative result of this Catholic endorsement was that there were periods when Protestants and Jews were persecuted. Rady provides an objective and fair assessment of the Habsburgs, and because of this, I would highly recommend it to those interested in this significant dynasty and its impact upon world history. Three asides: 1. Because of my admiration of the Habsburgs, I would like to think that I have a smidgen of Habsburg blood in me. Because of my German, Swiss, and Luxenberg pedigree, and given the Habsburgs’ propensity to beget huddles of children, there is a chance. 2. Many of the Habsburg Emperors are buried in the crypt of the Capuchin monastery in Vienna—of which I am also proud. 3. The first Habsburg emperor was considered to be a saint, and the cause for the canonization of the last emperor, Blessed Karl (1887-1922), is moving forward.

One can always count on Mike Aquilina writing a good book. He is noted for writing books, of moderate size, on the Fathers of the Church and the patristic era. His latest book is a life of Athanasius—Fathers of the Father: St. Athanasius. (He has also authored similar books on Irenaeus, Augustine, and John Chrysostom.) Because of his staunch defense and promotion of the Creed of the Council of Nicaea, that the Son of God was consubstantial with the Father, Athanasius was persecuted and exiled by a number of emperors. When most of his fellow bishops became Arian, Athanasius stood alone. He was Athanasius against the world! Athanasius is a hero of mine, and Aquilina does his heroic life justice. Highly recommended for those who are disheartened by some of today’s bishops, even at the highest level, though I do know a number of bishops of Athanasian grade.

Mary Elizabeth Podles may not be well known by many. However, she should be, for she is an expert on the history of Christian art. She worked at Sotheby’s, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery. Presently, she is the Curator of Renaissance and Baroque Art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and she teaches Sacred Art and Architecture at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore. She recently authored a book, A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity. This book is a collection of essays, each one a thousand words in length, that she wrote for the magazine, Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity. Each essay examines a particular painting and provides the historical context and the theological significance of the work. Her book begins with the artwork within early Christianity and proceeds to the present. This volume is a joy to read, and the paintings are inspiring to contemplate. It would make a perfect Christmas gift for those interested in how Catholic and Christian art has impacted western culture.

Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap. is a noted American theologian and the author of several books.

 

Amy Welborn:

I began 2023 with great reading expectations. After all, several of my favorite contemporary novelists had new works coming out. It was going to be a great summer and fall! Reader, it was not. All of those I was looking forward to: Colin Whitehead (Crook Manifesto)¸ Richard Russo (Somebody’s Fool), Andre Dubus III (Such Kindness), Luis Alberto Urrea (Good Night, Irene)—and some I know I’m supposed to like more than I do—Ann Patchett (Tom Lake) and Alice McDermott (Absolution)—were disappointing. Everyone just seems tired.

So what didn’t disappoint? I’ll pull a few from that particular box, highlighting titles that I appreciated and believe merit more—or renewed—attention.

Aside from fiction, I read a lot of history. One of the best I found this year was The 272 by Rachel L. Swarns. The title refers to the 272 enslaved men, women, and children who were owned and then sold in 1838 by the Jesuits to save—to put it bluntly—Georgetown University. Yes, that’s why Georgetown survived almost certain collapse: trafficking in human beings.

The Jesuit’s economic exploitation of human beings during this period is a grim story, but Swarms relates it with clarity and objectivity—and includes a helpful final chapter exploring her own attempt to balance this—and other challenging historical (and present) realities about Catholicism—with her faith.

So what about fiction? I read a few more works by Wilfrid Sheed in preparation for a talk I gave on his novel The Hack at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture fall conference. My favorite was Square’s Progress (1965), which you might say was a little like Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, but funnier and with less death.

Fred and Alison Cope live in a New Jersey suburb. It’s the early 60’s. Alison is dissatisfied, Fred doesn’t really grasp her determination to live “life-as-a-work-of-art,” so they separate. Alison goes to her parents in Pennsylvania, and after a brief foray into Greenwich Village, Fred takes off for Spain because, why not? If your wife’s charge against you is essentially that you’re not hip enough and the Village is already a tourist trap, Spain might be the place. You can at least try, but even then:

“Fred had just the beginnings of a beard, and had never felt so stupid about anything in his life.”

Let’s turn to Daphne Mould, the author of two of the more memorable Catholic-themed books I read this year: The Rock of Truth (1953) about her conversion to Catholicism and Peter’s Boat: A Convert’s Experience of Catholic Living (1959).

Mould, born in England in 1920, raised Anglican, was a skeptic from an early age. She was also keenly independent from the beginning, loved nature, driving cars and flying. She moved to Scotland as a young woman to study geology in Edinburgh, where she eventually earned her doctorate.

Completely anti-religious and particularly anti-Catholic at this point, she nonetheless set out to write a book about Celtic saints, not only to explore their historical role and relationship to the natural world, but also to expose their intellectual folly.

You won’t believe what happened next!

It’s a fascinating story of conversion and life afterwards. Mould is intellectually oriented, and disarmingly open to exploring her weaknesses in that regard, especially in relationship to her spiritual journey, admitting that the search for truth came first and that her embrace of God’s love for her was actually a challenge.

She’s forthright about the fact that conversion is a beginning, not an end. There’s no pretense about the struggles, the doubts, and the gradual acclimation to living the Catholic faith, post-conversion.

Mould’s passion for nature, especially mountains, leads to some beautiful and bracing reflections like this one, in which being lost and confused on a mountain evolves into a short course in discernment:

My experience on Carrauntual in the mist shows how easily and quickly the senses lead one astray. So too in the spiritual ascent; our senses must give place to the compass of Faith, to the unemotional decisions of reason and will, ignoring the blandishments of feelings of piety, personal likes and dislikes. The way to God is hard, it may be desperately hard, we can expect no comfort, no consolation on it, except the intellectual exhilaration of knowing Truth. After all, when I came out onto the summit of Carrauntual, I came to the cross.

Amy Welborn is a writer living in Birmingham, Alabama. She is the author of many books, including Loyola Kids Book of Feasts, Seasons and Celebrations.

 

Frank Wilson:

This past year I have actually read no new books. And most of the books I have read have been religious in nature. Two have been by Paul Johnson: Jesus: A 21st Century Biography and The Quest for God: A Personal Pilgrimage. These are books that give you fresh insight into things you thought you knew all about.

Three other books have very much impressed me: The Jesus Prayer and The Power of the Name by Kallistos Ware, an English Eastern Orthodox bishop who died in 2022, and The Jesus Prayer by Frederica Matthews-Green. The Jesus Prayer is practiced routinely in the Eastern Orthodox Church, but has recently been picked up  by Catholics and others. It has to be practiced to be appreciated. 

One other book that I must mention is our very own Carl Olson’s Did Jesus Really Rise From the Dead? I have been re-reading it. It is even better the second time around.

Frank Wilson is the retired book editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

 

Jeff Ziegler:

When Laeta, a Roman matron, sought advice from St. Jerome on the education of her daughter, he replied, “Let her learn the Psalter first, and find her recreation in its songs; let her learn from Solomon’s Proverbs the way of life, from Ecclesiastes how to trample on the world …” (quoted in Pope Benedict XV, Spiritus Paraclitus, n. 41).

St. Jerome’s advice to begin one’s encounter with the Sacred Scriptures with these three books led me to seek out a calendar for the non-liturgical reading of the Psalms over the course of each month; in different months, Hasidic and Anglican websites provided regimens for reading the Psalms in my favorite Catholic versions of the Scriptures. With thirty-one chapters, the Book of Proverbs has also lent itself to regular monthly readings, as has the Book of Ecclesiastes (twelve chapters) in conjunction with the Book of Wisdom (nineteen).

A reading of the Psalms is aided by the commentary of Cassiodorus, who poured his erudite mind and monastic heart into his magnificent Explanation of the Psalms, translated and annotated by the late P. G. Walsh with much learning and love.

The presence of the first volume of the Harvard Classics on a bookshelf led me to reread the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and to turn to the Journal of John Woolman for the first time.

There is so much that is admirable in Franklin—his respect for his parents and ancestors, his love of reading and discussion, his interest in science and the diffusion of knowledge, his pursuit of virtue as a young man, his disciplined use of time, his preference for the common good to gaining credit for himself, his tolerance toward the Catholic faith—that one regrets all the more his attitude toward religious doctrine as an unnecessary distraction.

Woolman was an abolitionist who sought to convince fellow Quakers to release their slaves and abandon their focus on material wealth. His earnest pursuit of God’s will, his life of prayer, and his docility to what he believed to be the promptings of divine grace put the reader to shame.

Plato’s Gorgias, recommended by Professor Robert George of Princeton University on the first episode of the Anchored podcast, is a dialogue on rhetoric that raises discomfiting but important questions about one’s words and one’s way of life.

When William Jennings Bryan compiled speeches from America’s founding era in the eighth volume of The World’s Famous Orations, he included the texts of patriots—Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike—as well as Native Americans. The stirring defense of natural rights offered by James Otis, the pathos of James Logan’s lament, and the diffidence and foresight of George Washington transport the reader to that time.

The tenth anniversary of Pope Francis’s Lumen Fidei led me to rediscover his theologically rich first encyclical. Christine Perrin’s Art of Poetry, a collection of over a hundred British and American poems, included old favorites and new discoveries, particularly sestinas that were as dazzling as they were intricate.

Fátima in Lúcia’s Own Words helped me better understand the apparitions in Portugal. Part of their message is the exhortation to pray the Rosary—the Rosary which, from the fifteenth century, has been described as the new psalter. Though they are not books, how grateful I am to the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes for its daily Rosary video and to the Web Gallery of Art for its treasury of sacred art, which for me have been an aid to praying that beloved prayer.

J. J. Ziegler, who holds degrees in classics and sacred theology, writes from North Carolina.