The best books Catholic Culture staff read in 2024

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jan 06, 2025 | In Reviews

It’s time for the Catholic Culture staff’s roundup of our favorite things we read in the past year! This year we have lists by Phil Lawler, Dr. Jeff Mirus, Peter Wolfgang, Dr. Jim Papandrea, and Thomas Mirus.

Phil Lawler

In no particular order:

NON-FICTION

Science at the Doorstep of God, by Father Robert Spitzer, SJ, explains—in terms that an intelligent non-scientist can usually follow—how the latest developments in scientific research support belief in the afterlife, the Creator, and in fact the Catholic faith. This book is not easy to digest, and many readers will sometimes by lost in the details, as I was. But the main lines of Father Spitzer’s argument are easy to grasp, and difficult to dispute.

Battle Cry of Freedom, by James McPherson, is the best single-volume account of the Civil War that I have discovered. Writing the history of a war is always a challenge, because there are so many different factors—economic, social, and political as well as military—that contribute to an overall understanding. McPherson moves smoothly among those factors and across the different military fronts, preserving a lively pace without skimping on details.

War Doctor: Surgery on the Front Line, by David Nott, is a sometimes harrowing memoir written by a surgeon who has volunteered to serve in war zones all around the world: Afghanistan, Congo, Darfur, Gaza, Iraq, Syria, and more. He recounts the difficulties of remaining neutral, being prepared to help the wounded on both sides of brutal conflicts, routinely frustrated by the restrictions that military operations place on proper medical care. He risks his own life repeatedly, to save the lives of soldiers who may be doomed anyway, and civilians who should have been spared. Not surprisingly, after each heart-pounding deployment, he has trouble adjusting to routine life in a peacetime hospital.

The American Republic, by Orestes Brownson, is now in the public domain, and several different editions are available—none of them entirely satisfactory. Written at the time of the Civil War, by one of America’s most original political theorists, this book could serve as a useful bridge between the writings of the Founding Fathers and the public debates of the 20^th century. Brownson, a convert to Catholicism, anticipates and answers some of the questions being raised by Catholic writers today, about the relationship between religious authority and secular power.

The Innocence of Pontius Pilate, by David Lloyd Dusenbury, is easily the most ambitious book that I read in 2024. The author sets out to show how Christ’s trial before Pilate led to an entirely new understanding of government, and the birth of what we now know as secularism. With an astonishing breadth of scholarship (the footnotes literally cover almost 100 pages, the bibliography another 50), Dusenbury shows how from the time of Christ through the Middle Ages and into modernity, theological arguments over the nature of Pilate’s guilt have shaped our understanding of what belongs to Caesar and what to God.

NOVELS

An Artist of the Floating World, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is in some ways similar to the same author’s work, Remains of the Day. In both cases the central character is struggling to come to terms with the way the world around him as changed. In this book, the scene is set in Japan after World War II, and an aging artist reflects on his small role in supporting the militaristic regime that brought national disaster and disgrace. But is he realistic about his own role? His memory is selective; his children think he is living under illusions. Ishiguro paints his own picture with delicacy, letting the reader decide where reality lies.

Pigs Have Wings, by P.G. Wodehouse, is one of the best novels in the Blandings Castle series by the great master. Wodehouse is unmatched, of course, in his comic genius and his imaginative prose. At it happens I re-read this book (an old friend) after having read a good murder mystery. In reading a good mystery, one appreciates the careful crafting of the plot. I hadn’t realized, until reading this book against that background, how skillful Wodehouse can be at building a story to achieve maximum chaos.

The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, by Christopher Beha, touches on a a combination of themes guaranteed to pique my interest: faith, baseball, politics, statistics, and (bad) journalism. Toss in a few ill-starred romances, add dysfunctional families, and you have the right setting for a story about how many contemporary trends are bringing us—as individuals and as a society—ever closer to the brink of disaster. (Caution: The main characters in this book display the moral flaws that lead to their disasters, and the author provides details that may be—in one scene certainly are—excessively graphic.)

Phil Lawler has been a Catholic journalist for more than 30 years. He has edited several Catholic magazines and written eight books. Founder of Catholic World News, he is the news director and lead analyst at CatholicCulture.org.

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Dr. Jeff Mirus

2024 was for me a year for cataract surgery which, while it improved my vision overall, unfortunately left me with a kind of fluctuating blurriness in my close vision, especially whenever there is not a great deal of extra light, and most noticeably at the end of the day when I might be doing more recreational reading with tired eyes. Consequently I’ve relied even more on my ancient technique of skimming to get the gist of a book rather than close reading to savor it. I have no complaints; I can drive at night again, can’t I?

Nonetheless, the book I have read most carefully and enjoyed most this year was Fr. Cornelius Michael Buckley’s magnificently well-written biography Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J.: California Blackrobe. Fessio is probably best known for his founding of Ignatius Press, but has been involved in a large number of educational (in every sense of the word) apostolic exploits. See my very brief review for details about this new book, which is the story of a Jesuit life well-lived—and therefore not without significant conflict. Fr. Fessio is definitely one of my contemporary heroes but, to be fair, it is also easy to see why his impetuous, forceful, outside-the-box and highly creative personality has caused many who have been on the receiving end of his ardor to tear their hair out. The biography is of course justly sympathetic to Fr. Fessio but it is also scrupulously fair (as is Fr. Fessio himself). Photo gallery included!

The most deeply spiritual book I’ve read this year—another one which had me visually straining through every word—was also published by Ignatius Press. It is a collection of brief excerpts from the writings and addresses of Pope Benedict XVI, edited by Luca Caruso and with a welcome foreword by Pope Francis. The title is God Is Ever New: Meditations on Life, Love, and Freedom. I included this one in a roundup of books I posted back in August.

This calls to mind a book by “Pope Benedict” that I reviewed in 2023, but omitted from the previous annual round-up. This was a collection of lectures which Joseph Ratzinger had given in 1985, entitled The Divine Project. It sheds a marvelous light on Divine Providence, grasping God’s plan as told in Scripture. If you want to increase your understanding of and appreciation for Divine Providence—that is, if you don’t want it to be in your mind just another ancient Biblical construct—this is the book for you.

Ignatius has also just released a major biography of Cardinal Pell, the Australian who, shortly before his death, spent time in prison on patently trumped-up charges of sexual abuse. Many of my readers will want to be aware of it: George Cardinal Pell: Pax Invictis, by Tess Livingstone. It’s a major work of over five hundred pages. Though I am only three-quarters through it at present, it has proved so far to be an important study and, as with the Fessio biography, it is highly relevant to the ongoing battle for an authentic Catholicism.

I also recently purchased the leather-bound edition of the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible. It uses the widely available RSV Second Catholic Edition for the Biblical text, and features extensive commentary by a team headed by the redoubtable Scott Hahn. In fact, it includes essays, introductions, commentary, charts, notes and maps. The quality of the printing is superb, despite the need in a work of this kind to resort to fairly small type. You can purchase it complete or just the New Testament, and in various bindings, so choose carefully. Be aware that while the Press is trying to keep up through additional printings, the demand is high, so there may be delays (which will be noted on the respective sales pages). A highly recommended edition.

This year my list is all Ignatius Press all of the time, which signifies two things: First, that Ignatius Press is my favorite Catholic press, though it should be recognized that the bulk of its major offerings are for what we might call “intellectuals”; and, second, that I haven’t had much time to read many recreational books, or even serious books that stray beyond the intensely Catholic universe.

Nonetheless, for purely recreational purposes I am now revisiting (on my phone with its brightly illuminated screen) the fine series of mysteries written (and still being written) by Charles Finch, whose hero is the nineteenth-century gentleman and early detective Charles Lenox, centered (of course) in Victorian London. The Charles Lenox series now extends to fifteen volumes. It is elegantly written and both fully and faithfully immersed in its period. The characters are realistic and genuinely likable, and the plots are excellent. In my opinion, the whole series is a significant achievement, both as detection and as literature.

Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org.

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Peter Wolfgang

Dr. Jeff Mirus writes that he hasn’t “had much time to read many recreational books, or even serious books that stray beyond the intensely Catholic universe.” Likewise for me in 2024. In fact, several of the books I did read were of a particular universe within that universe.

St. Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei, died fifty years ago but Scepter Press is only now publishing some of his greatest hits. While The Collected Letters: Volume 2 does include specific instructions to members of Opus Dei, much of it is advice from which Christians in general would derive great benefit. How to approach our fellow Christians, and society at large, when we disagree. Why laypeople should not “offload” their responsibilities to the hierarchy. How to make Christ the summit of all human activity. How to approach a world in need of evangelization as “a sea without shores.” The prerequisite of cheerfulness, of Christian joy. Even an interesting aside on why he thinks Christians should be teachers in the public schools.

The Collected Letters: On the Work of St. Gabriel in Opus Dei may be my favorite of all St. Josemaría’s published work. Again, while it is specifically focused on the role of the supernumerary, that is, the married lay members of Opus Dei, what he says here has wide application for how to be a Christian in the everyday world.

I also read the two-volume Opus Dei: A History from Scepter Press and The Juridical Mind of Blessed Josemaria Escriva: A Brief History of the Canonical Path of Opus Dei. As the Vatican and Opus Dei are in the midst are reformulating the Work’s juridical status, these books help remind us that the charism precedes the institution and will continue on regardless of how matters will be settled.

Volume one of the History lays out Opus Dei’s founding charism: divine filiation, holiness and apostolate, sanctifying the world from within. It covers how Opus Dei began, how a women’s section was added, and married members, and priests, and diocesan priests, the search for a proper juridical structure under which all these could exist in one particular group within the Church, the Spanish Civil War, the hostility of the Jesuits to Opus Dei, the tricky feat of managing relations with Franco’s regime, spreading the Work to other countries, founding new apostolates. I particularly loved that Sr. Lucia, the Fatima visionary, was responsible for getting Opus Dei into Portugal.

Volume two of the History covers how St. Josemaría Escrivá did indeed begin with “the educated”; the attention Opus Dei gives to the world of fashion, even launching a chic European magazine in the 1960s (“The Telva girl was a classy, dynamic woman, committed to her time and of firm convictions.”); how Vatican II strengthened Opus Dei’s charism; how the relationship with Pope St. Paul VI was warm, then cold, then warm again; how relations with Jesuit leader Pedro Arrupe were good until they weren’t; navigating the hostility of the Falangists, and of the great von Balthasar and others; how the Legion of Christ tried to sabotage Opus Dei’s becoming a prelature; and the huge amount of study and work that preceded Rome’s decision to make Opus Dei a prelature.

These books were published prior to current events in Rome regarding the Work. But nearly everything related to the matter is anticipated here and covered. The numeraries who work internally, making sure the women have proper benefits, the clericalist misunderstanding of the Work by those who think lay people can’t properly belong to it, and so forth. What shines in Volume 2 of the History, to my eyes, is Opus Dei’s mission, its foundational ideas. “Divine filiation, knowledge of and devotion to Jesus Christ, and the sanctification of work as a means of holiness and Christian witness,” having “a priestly soul and, at the same time, a lay mentality,” on “Christ’s call to be a leaven in society through a joyful and sober life that sometimes goes against the dominant way of thinking,” on growing in “fortitude, mastery of feelings, empathy, and the ability to forgive,” on how the mission is “to identify with Christ and bring him to all social circles.” The book ends with a series of interviews with members of the Work. This one guy sums it up best: “It is sometimes difficult to grasp the idea that a group exists for no other reason than the sanctification of its members.” Bingo. That’s Opus Dei.

I also read Peter Kreeft’s Catholics and Protestants: What Can We Learn from Each Other? which I wrote about here, Mary Ann Glendon’s In the Court of Three Popes, Archbishop Georg Ganswein’s Who Believes Is Not Alone: My Life Beside Benedict XVI, and Walking with God Walking with Godby Tim Gray and Jeff Cavins. I especially enjoyed with Walking With God, which is essentially the Great Adventure Bible timeline in book form.

Finally, I read Son of Hamas, 1984, 1984 and The Controversialist, the autobiography of former New Republic owner Martin Peretz. Reading both Marty Peretz and Mary Ann Glendon, two very different Harvard eminences, can give the reader a sort of culture vertigo. But I recommend them both, for a front row seat among elites in both parties who help shape our world, for good and for ill.

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika.

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Dr. Jim Papandrea

NON-FICTION

The Philokalia (writings of the desert fathers and other ascetics). I had already read an abridged version of this as part of my research for Praying Like the Early Church, and so this year I decided to get the full text (it’s a 5 volume set) and read through it in my devotional times each morning. I’m actually still working through it, but I don’t want to go too fast, and I don’t want to turn my morning devotions into an academic project, so I’m taking it very slow. For those who want the abridged version, I read one that was a collection of excerpts annotated by Allyne Smith, but there are probably other ones out there, and maybe better ones. For those who want to dive into the full text, you’ll find it listed as translated by G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. It may be hard to find. I found the first four volumes as a set on Amazon, but then had to order volume 5 separately.

Why I Am Roman Catholic, by Matthew Levering. You may wonder why a Catholic scholar reads a book like this—I was originally asked to write a blurb for it, which I did—but when I received my hard copy, I read the whole thing again. It’s not just stuff you already know. Interestingly, it’s published by an evangelical/ecumenical publisher, and it’s part of a series, with others writing books about why they are what they are. But if you’ve never read anything by Dr. Matthew Levering, I promise this won’t be the last book by him that you read; you will want to read more. He is an amazing scholar, and yet he’s able to make everything accessible to the non-scholar.

More Paradoxes, by Henri De Lubac. De Lubac is one of my favorite 20th century theologians, and I loved Paradoxes of Faith when I read it. Only about a year ago I realized there is a sequel. Like the first one, it’s a lot of short but deep thoughts on the faith, which often open up the mind to consider things from new angles.

The Genius in the Design: Bernini, Borromini, and the Rivalry That Transformed Rome, by Jake Morrissey. I’m considered an expert on early Christian Rome, but I’m not an art historian, and so I figured I could stand to brush up on my knowledge of Renaissance and Baroque Rome. Reading this book was a lot like watching a very satisfying documentary. Just enough drama to keep it interesting, but very informative, and well written.

FICTION

Loss and Gain, by St. John Henry Newman. This the fictional story of a man’s conversion to Catholicism, and most people think it’s somewhat autobiographical. But the amazing thing is, Newman writes an entirely believable story of a man converted from Protestant to Catholic without ever setting foot in a Catholic church or even meeting a Catholic priest. It’s done entirely by the logic of his own convictions—part of which compel him to reject relativism and stand for the reality of absolute truth—and that feels as relevant in our time as it must have been in Newman’s. And I think it sheds a lot of light on why we often can’t get along with our own family members who differ from us on religious or political views, because what’s behind that is a different worldview. The person who believes in absolute truth—and who refuses to let go of the conviction that if some things are true then some other things have to be false, and people do not get to make up their own truth—that person finds he can no longer respect the person who opts for the easy world of all gray and no black or white, and in the end Newman’s character loses friends and even family relationships in order to gain Catholicism, and keep his integrity.

Callista, also by St. John Henry Newman. This is the story of early Christians facing persecution in third century North Africa. As a historian who has spent about 30 years in the third century, it’s not super accurate, but the story is compelling, and worth reading. And to be fair, Newman was not a patristics scholar, and historical accuracy was not really his point, but rather the big questions of ultimate importance, and why our faith is worth dying for. I read Callista first, and I was told that I wouldn’t like Loss and Gain as much as I liked Callista, but for me, I actually liked Loss and Gain more. But Callista is short enough that it’s worth reading, especially if you like Newman.

Dr. James Papandrea is a senior fellow of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology and a Catholic member of the faculty at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. He is the host of the podcast Way of the Fathers, produced by Catholic Culture. A theological consultant for EWTN’s series The Heresies, he is also the writer and presenter for The Original Church series on YouTube.

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Thomas Mirus

As usual, in addition to my favorite books and articles, I’ve thrown in some music and podcasts.

NEW BOOKS

For the following four books, I link to my interviews with the authors on the Catholic Culture Podcast.

Fr. John Saward, World Invisible: The Catholic Doctrine of the Angels. An accessible yet deep introductory treatment drawing on St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Denys the Carthusian, and more recent theologians like Fr. Vonier and Fr. Bonino.

Bishop Erik Varden, Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses. This not a standard catechesis on chastity, but a kind of semantic meditation on it. Like St. John Paul II, Bp. Varden argues for why we need to meditate on the original vocation of man before the Fall, and the power of grace to restore us, rather than limiting our options to what sinful nature is capable of.

D.C. Schindler, God and the City: An Essay in Political Metaphysics. Schindler draws an analogy between metaphysics as the most comprehensive science in the theoretical order and politics as the most comprehensive science in the practical order. Examining how in metaphysics, God is necessarily involved, yet without being the direct object of that science, Schindler argues that the same is true of the relationship between God and politics. Just as it is in God that the individual person “lives and moves and has its being”, even before revelation and grace enter the picture, God is both the highest good of human community, and intimately present within it.

Daniel McInerny, Beauty & Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts. Philosopher and novelist Daniel McInerny argues for a recovery of the Aristotelian understanding of art as fundamentally imitative or mimetic. More boldly, he claims that this imitation is narrative and moral in nature, even in art forms that are not typically considered storytelling arts. His theory is quite robust, nuanced and allows for the enjoyment of a broad range of artistic genres/traditions/styles. It is probably perfect when applied to the novel. Unlike some past conservative thinkers who followed the mimetic view of art, McInerny is not crudely moralistic or closed off to a diversity of artistic traditions and styles (including modern ones). Unfortunately, I think he errs in starting with a theory that he is confident in advance will apply to all the arts, rather than taking each art form on its own terms. In particular, I think the theory fails to provide a complete account of music (from both the listener’s and the musician’s perspective). I enjoyed a robust discussion of these issues with McInerny on the Catholic Culture Podcast.

SPIRITUAL READING/THEOLOGY

The Golden Arrow: The Revelations of Sr. Mary of St. Peter. Includes the memoir of Sr. Marie of St. Pierre, as well as the revelations this early-19^th-cenury French Carmelite received from our Lord, in which He gave her the mission of spreading devotion to His Holy Face in reparation for blasphemies against the Holy Name and the profanation of Sundays. This important devotion is also important as a counterpart to Fatima, as Jesus specifically demanded its use to combat the outrages committed by “revolutionary men”—at that time the French-revolutionary-era communists, but applicable to the anti-Christ revolutionaries of our age as well. St. Therese and her whole family were deeply formed by this devotion.

Charles Coulombe, Blessed Charles of Austria: A Holy Emperor and His Legacy. I read this during a trip to Austria, and it inspired me to write an article about how Catholics should view the relation between Church and state.

St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Thomas Williams. A beautiful translation with minimal but helpful notes. Williams had the great idea of leaving Augustine’s Scripture references unmarked in the text, without quotes or italics (but with marginal citations), which really highlights how much the saint made Scripture the very language he spoke in.

St. Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. The Trinity is one of St. Augustine’s greatest writings, on par with City of God despite receiving much less attention today. This groundbreaking work perfected Trinitarian logic and made important contributions to the theory of mind, as St. Augustine used the relationship between human memory, understanding, and will as an analogy for the Trinity. Fr. Hill believed that having a distinct relationship with each person of the Trinity, and especially with the Holy Spirit, had been neglected in Catholic spiritual life in recent centuries, and hoped his translation (published by New City Press) would help to revive Trinitarian spirituality. His translation is beautiful and brings out how conversational Augustine’s writing style is. The introductions and footnotes are extremely helpful (and often entertaining), except one note which veers too close to unorthodox biblical-historical criticism.

St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. William Babcock. This translation is also from New City Press. This was my first time reading this epic work, and I don’t have much to say about it other than that it’s amazing how many different genres and topics St. Augustine covers in the course of a single, thousand-page argument about salvation history. I guess it goes to show that history has to touch on all the sciences.

St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life. I had read this before, but enjoyed revisiting it as read by James Majewski on our podcast Catholic Culture Audiobooks.

St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching. This is one of the earliest really comprehensive statements of Christian theology, much shorter and more digestible than the author’s better-known Against Heresies. St. Irenaeus is clearly worthy of being the earliest figure to be named a Doctor of the Church. His notion of recapitulation is very important for understanding our faith, not to mention his emphasis on apostolic succession—this is a work worth reading.

PHILOSOPHY

Aristotle, Physics.

Plotinus, The Enneads, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson. Neo-Platonism exerted a great influence on the Church Fathers of late antiquity, and through them, on medieval theology and mysticism. It has some striking things in common with Christianity (and perhaps partly cribbed from it), including something vaguely resembling the Trinity. However, when not carefully moderated, neo-Platonic influence has led to some very serious heresies, including emanationism, universalism, seeing matter as evil, and aberrant forms of mysticism.* Origen is the classic case of how too much neo-Platonic influence can distort the faith. St. Augustine, or indeed St. Thomas Aquinas via Pseudo-Dionysius, is an example of a healthier appropriation of some neo-Platonic ideas.

Since Plato never wrote treatises, but instead wrote dialogues which do not always explicitly disclose what he really thought, Plotinus is in many ways doing exegesis of Plato, trying to build his work into an explicit philosophical-spiritual system. Plotinus’s Enneads are massive and often impenetrable. At times he offers beautiful insights, and the very questions he thinks to ask and distinctions he is able to make are proof of his brilliance, even when Aquinas has better answers to those questions. At other times he reads like arbitrary mystical gobbledygook.

If you just want an introduction, you might seek out the Hackett Essential Enneads. It’s a quarter of the length of the complete Enneads listed above.

*If these heresies sound like Gnosticism to you, you may be surprised to learn that Plotinus wrote a blistering attack on Gnostic teachings: Ennead 2.9, Against the Gnostics. I mention this because it makes for fascinating comparison with St. Irenaeus’s refutation of Gnosticism in Against Heresies, and so is worth checking out even if you’re more interested in Patristics than Platonism.

HISTORY/MEMOIR

Christopher Page, The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years. This tome is the definitive work on the first millenium of Christian sacred music. Now of course for most of that time, musical notation had not yet been invented. We have to rely on textual sources and, occasionally, images for our scant knowledge of music in the first few centuries of the Church. So, for instance, Page traces the development of the minor order of lector, which was likely at first undistinguished from cantor. As times goes on, church singing becomes an increasingly distinct (and usually clerical) skill set. (We even see many bishops raised from the ranks of cantors because they were among the most literate clergy.) Eventually, cathedral scholae develop. A large part of the book deals with the imposition of Roman chant and liturgy on the Frankish realms. It is among the Franks that primitive forms of notation arise, and then the Italian monk Guido of Arezzo invents the musical staff. He does this for spiritual reasons: monks can now, Guido says, learn in two years a repertoire of chants which would have previously taken them ten years to learn by ear, and now they have more time to focus on theology, prayer and growth in virtue. But as a byproduct, the stage is set for the whole development of European music.

Raïssa Maritain, We Have Been Friends Together & Adventures in Grace. These memoirs were very popular among American Catholics upon their publication in the early 1940s. Raïssa was the wife of the philosopher Jacques Maritain and herself a philosopher, poet & mystic. The book describes a unique period when French Catholicism showed much promise of reviving out of the ashes of Enlightenment rationalism. There are poignant elegies to many great French Catholic artists and thinkers with whom the Maritains were friends, and, not least, there is a beautiful account of the conversion of the young couple themselves.

Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919-1933. Our Lord and St. Paul both said we should not associate with people who claim to be Catholic but hold obstinately to heresy. For obvious reasons, I also would not read or recommend a work of theology by a heretic; a history book, however, is a different matter, since even someone with the most abhorrent views can turn out an important work of scholarship. In this case, the author is a pro-homosexual Jesuit, and since the book contains a few heretical remarks, I can only recommend it to well-formed Catholics with a scholarly interest in the topic. Still, Jazz Age Catholicism explains much about the milieu leading up to a boom of unlikely conversions and interest in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas among modern artists in France after the first World War—and about the ups and downs of the Faith in post-Enlightenment France more generally. The Maritain memoir above, however, will be better suited for the needs of most readers interested in this period.

Plutarch, Lives (the Dryden translation edited by Arthur Hugh Clough). The ancient historian Plutarch wrote biographical essays about famous Greeks and Romans, which I’ve been reading slowly for years. One of my favorites is his life of Dion, a pupil of Plato who became the ruler of Syracuse and attempted to be a good philosopher-king. I was deeply moved by his patience and longsuffering with his people after repeated betrayals. Plutarch was also the primary source for a number of Shakespeare’s plays based on ancient history. I was delighted to find that his lives of figures referenced in Julius Caesar, like Marcus Brutus and Pompey, were as gripping and poignant as Shakespeare’s play itself.

NOVELS

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

P.G. Wodehouse, Bertie Wooster Sees It Through.

Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander.

PLAYS/POETRY

William Shakespeare, King Lear, Othello, Richard II, Richard IV Parts One and Two, Cymbeline.

Robert Browning, “Andrea del Sarto”, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Deserted Garden”.

James Matthew Wilson, The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking. A brilliantly written, carefully reasoned polemic about what poetry is and is not.

ESSAYS

Jonathan Roberts, “Classical Schools Are Not Really Classical”. An important critique of the Dorothy Sayers paradigm of classical education, and of contemporary classical schools’ frequent neglect of the historical core of classical education: the learning of classical languages, Latin and Greek, and the reading of classical works in those languages.

Will Tavlin, “Casual Viewing”. An important essay on how streaming has destroyed the movie business, and movie viewing, as we know it. Money quote: “Several screenwriters who’ve worked for [Netflix] told me a common note from company executives is ‘have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.’” (Includes some profanity.)

Thomas Ward, “Middle-Earth Heroes”. An insightful critique of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films on their 20^th anniversary.

Fr. Matthias M. Sasko, F.I., “Marian Maximalism: Notion, Proof, and Assent”. Drawing on St. Alphonsus, Bl. John Duns Scotus, St. John Henry Newman, and others, Fr. Sasko puts “Marian maximalism” in a theological context that renders it quite defensible.

Rhys Laverty, “Lady Scrooges”. An essay on why the women in A Christmas Carol are less ready to forgive Scrooge than are the men—with political implications.

PODCASTS

New Humanists. I’ve been devouring the archive of this podcast for the past few months. Hosted by Jonathan Roberts and Ryan Hammill, founders of the Ancient Language Institute, it’s all about the tradition of humanistic education. They have been discussing items from The Great Tradition, Richard Gamble’s hefty anthology of more than two thousand years of writing on the liberal arts. If you want to learn about what everyone from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the Church Fathers to the medieval monks to the Renaissance humanists to the Protestant Reformers to the modern defenders of the liberal arts thought about education, listen to New Humanists. The discussion is energetic and the hosts are Christians who have skin in the game and know that souls are at stake. It’s really, really good.

The Jane Austen Podcast with Alison Larkin. Austen’s novels narrated excellently by Larkin, an English comedian and actress. So far she’s done Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

Controversies in Church History. History professor Darrick Taylor gives in-depth, engaging, responsible, balanced, and orthodox accounts of various ecclesiastical controversies throughout history. I only just started listening to this podcast, which has been going since 2019 and has a deep archive. I have enjoyed his episodes on Chateaubriand, on the origins of the charismatic movement, and his series on the history of traditionalism, and I look forward to listening to his series on liberation theology among other things.

MUSIC

Mauricé Durufle, Requiem, motets and other works. See my podcast episode about this great 20^th-century Catholic sacred composer.

Anton Bruckner, Sixth Symphony. Another great Catholic composer.

Camille Saint-Saens, Symphony #3 in C Minor (Organ Symphony).

Franz Schubert, Piano Quintet in A Major (Trout Quintet).

The Hugo Masters: An Anthology of Chinese Classical Music, Vol. 3: Wind Instruments. I played this anthology on my ear buds while exploring the Chinese section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I found that music can greatly enhance the museum experience, as it provides a kind of world-context that would otherwise be missing, especially if it’s art from a foreign culture.