Beyond the books
Listen, watch and history
Not everyone learns best from a page. Here are podcasts, lectures, audiobooks, videos and films worth your time, and the histories that explain how each question came to be asked. Each names the questions it helps with.
To listen to
Podcasts, recorded lectures and free audiobooks: for the commute, the walk, the dishes.
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Ancient Faith Ministries · many Orthodox podcasts · Orthodox Christian podcasts on prayer, the Fathers, icons and the spiritual life: the Eastern tradition from within.
Helps with: What is salvation for?; The way of prayer; How should we speak of God?; Icons and images; God's essence and His energies
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Peter Adamson, 2010 · hundreds of 20-minute episodes · The whole history of philosophy, a short episode at a time, including the late antique, Byzantine, Islamic and medieval thinkers other surveys skip.
Helps with: Do natures and essences really exist?; Is 'being' said of God and of creatures in the same sense?; God's essence and His energies; Why is the good good?; Where does knowledge begin?; Faith and reason: who has the last word?; What makes you this one and no other?; Is there a spiritual soul?
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G. K. Chesterton · about 6 hours · Free volunteer recordings at LibriVox of Chesterton's account of how he came to the faith.
Helps with: Faith and reason: who has the last word?; Reform or tradition?; Is truth objective?
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Stephen West, 2013 · about 200 episodes · A clear, popular survey of philosophy, strongest on the moderns. Not Catholic: listen to understand the thinkers the Church is answering.
Helps with: Where does knowledge begin?; Is truth objective?; Are you free?; Person and community
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Matt Fradd, 2016 · weekly episodes and long interviews · Conversations and debates on God, morality and the Church, starting from St. Thomas. Also on video.
Helps with: Can reason know that God exists?; What is happiness?; Marriage, sex and the body's meaning; Rules or character?
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Peter Kreeft · many talks, most under an hour · A Boston College philosopher on God, suffering, heaven and happiness: clear, funny, and easy to listen to on a walk.
Helps with: Can reason know that God exists?; What is suffering for?; What is happiness?; Is truth objective?; What is heaven's happiness, at its heart?
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Podcast The Bible in a YearFr. Mike Schmitz, 2021 · 365 episodes, about 20 minutes each · The whole Bible read aloud over a year, in a reading plan that follows salvation history, with a short reflection each day.
Helps with: How should Scripture be read?
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Podcast The Catechism in a YearFr. Mike Schmitz, 2023 · 365 episodes, about 15 minutes each · The Catechism of the Catholic Church read aloud and explained, a few paragraphs a day.
Helps with: What do the sacraments do?; What is conscience?; Is morality objective and knowable?; Who can be saved?; Who interprets revelation?
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Podcast The History of ByzantiumRobin Pierson · hundreds of episodes · The Eastern Roman Empire from 476 to 1453, episode by episode: the councils, iconoclasm and the long road to the schism.
Helps with: Icons and images; The procession of the Holy Spirit; The office of Peter; What are the Eastern Catholic Churches?; Church and state
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Thomas à Kempis · about 7 hours · Free volunteer recordings at LibriVox of the most-read Christian book after the Bible.
Helps with: The way of prayer; Contemplation or action?
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Bishop Robert Barron · weekly episodes, about 30 to 45 minutes · Bishop Barron on faith and culture, answering listeners' questions on God, the Church and the arts.
Helps with: Are the world's learning and arts a danger or a gift?; Faith and reason: who has the last word?; Can reason know that God exists?
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St. Augustine · about 13 hours · Free volunteer recordings of the public-domain translations at LibriVox.
Helps with: How does grace move the will?; How fallen is human nature?; What is happiness?
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Thomas V. Mirus · long-form interviews · Interviews on Catholic art, music, literature and liturgy: what a culture formed by the faith looks like.
Helps with: Are the world's learning and arts a danger or a gift?; Should the faith take the forms of each culture it enters?; Liturgical development
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The Thomistic Institute · hundreds of recorded lectures, about an hour each · Lectures given by Dominicans and Catholic scholars on university campuses, on God, the soul, ethics and grace in the tradition of St. Thomas.
Helps with: Can reason know that God exists?; Is morality objective and knowable?; Is there a spiritual soul?; Are you free?; How does grace move the will?; Faith and reason: who has the last word?; What is happiness?
To watch
Documentaries, video courses and films that carry an argument.
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Film A Man for All SeasonsFred Zinnemann, 1966 · about 2 h · St. Thomas More refuses to swear to the King's supremacy over the Church, and keeps his conscience to the scaffold.
Helps with: What is conscience?; Church and state; The office of Peter
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The Thomistic Institute, 2020 · short videos, about 10 minutes each · A free video course in the thought of St. Thomas, taught by Dominican friars.
Helps with: Can reason know that God exists?; Do natures and essences really exist?; Is there a spiritual soul?; Is morality objective and knowable?; Faith and reason: who has the last word?
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Film BecketPeter Glenville, 1964 · about 2 h 30 min · Thomas Becket, the King's friend made Archbishop, takes the Church's side against Henry II.
Helps with: Church and state
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Bishop Robert Barron, 2011 · 10 episodes, about an hour each · A documentary series filmed in fifty locations on Christ, the Church, the sacraments, the saints and prayer.
Helps with: What do the sacraments do?; Are the world's learning and arts a danger or a gift?; The office of Peter; Icons and images; Liturgical development
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Film Into Great SilencePhilip Gröning, 2005 · about 2 h 45 min · A wordless documentary of a year inside the Grande Chartreuse, the Carthusian mother house.
Helps with: The way of prayer; Contemplation or action?
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Film Jesus of NazarethFranco Zeffirelli, 1977 · about 6 hours, a miniseries · The life of Christ from the Annunciation to the Resurrection, faithful to the Gospels.
Helps with: Where does your eye rest in Christ: His divinity or His humanity?; How should Scripture be read?
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Film Of Gods and MenXavier Beauvois, 2010 · about 2 h · The Trappist monks of Tibhirine, living among their Muslim neighbors, decide whether to stay as civil war closes in.
Helps with: What is suffering for?; May a Christian take up the sword?; Who can be saved?
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Bishop Robert Barron, 2016 · a series of short documentaries · Documentaries on the figures who shaped the Church and the culture: Aquinas, Newman, Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, Michelangelo, Chesterton and others.
Helps with: Faith and reason: who has the last word?; Does doctrine develop?; Contemplation or action?; Are the world's learning and arts a danger or a gift?
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Film The Island (Ostrov)Pavel Lungin, 2006 · about 1 h 50 min · A Russian Orthodox monk, a holy fool, lives in repentance for a sin of his youth.
Helps with: The way of prayer; What is salvation for?; What is suffering for?
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Film The MissionRoland Joffé, 1986 · about 2 h 5 min · Jesuit missions among the Guaraní are given up to the colonial powers; two priests choose between prayer and arms.
Helps with: Should the faith take the forms of each culture it enters?; May a Christian take up the sword?; Church and state
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Film SilenceMartin Scorsese, 2016 · about 2 h 40 min · Two Jesuits in seventeenth-century Japan face the persecution of Christians, from Endō's novel. Hard, and argued over.
Helps with: Should the faith take the forms of each culture it enters?; What is suffering for?; What is conscience?
The history behind the questions
Many disagreements make sense only once you know how they arose. Start with the approachable ones.
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A Popular History of the Catholic ChurchPhilip Hughes, 1947 · about 300 pages · The whole history of the Church in one readable volume, by the great English Catholic historian of the Reformation.
Helps with: The office of Peter; Church and state; Does doctrine develop?
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Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic HistoryRodney Stark, 2016 · about 270 pages · A non-Catholic sociologist takes apart the common myths: the Inquisition, the Crusades, the Dark Ages, science.
Helps with: May a Christian take up the sword?; Faith and reason: who has the last word?; Church and state
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How the Catholic Church Built Western CivilizationThomas E. Woods Jr., 2005 · about 250 pages · Universities, science, law, charity and economics: a popular survey of what the West owes the Church.
Helps with: Are the world's learning and arts a danger or a gift?; Faith and reason: who has the last word?; The economic order
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Saints and Sinners: A History of the PopesEamon Duffy, 1997 · about 400 pages · Two thousand years of the papacy, honest about its failures, showing how the office of Peter grew into what it is.
Helps with: The office of Peter; When the Pope speaks; Church and state
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Scholasticism: Personalities and Problems of Medieval PhilosophyJosef Pieper, 1960 · about 180 pages · Short portraits of the schoolmen, and why the medieval marriage of faith and reason held and then came apart.
Helps with: Faith and reason: who has the last word?; What is theology for?; Do natures and essences really exist?
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The Early ChurchHenry Chadwick, 1967 · about 300 pages · A compact, judicious history of the first centuries: persecution, councils, bishops and the shape of doctrine.
Helps with: Does doctrine develop?; Who interprets revelation?; Holy Orders and the Church's constitution; How should Scripture be read?
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The First Thousand Years: A Global History of ChristianityRobert Louis Wilken, 2012 · about 400 pages · The first millennium told whole, East and West, from Jerusalem to Ethiopia, Persia and China, before the Churches divided.
Helps with: What are the Eastern Catholic Churches?; Icons and images; The procession of the Holy Spirit; The office of Peter; Should the faith take the forms of each culture it enters?; The nation and the Church
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The Great HeresiesHilaire Belloc, 1938 · about 160 pages · Arianism, Islam, the Albigensians, the Reformation and the modern attack, told briskly as the Church's great quarrels. Partisan, and meant to be.
Helps with: How are we made right with God?; Who interprets revelation?; The office of Peter; The body and its desires
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The Lost History of ChristianityPhilip Jenkins, 2008 · about 300 pages · The thousand-year golden age of the Church in Asia and Africa, and how it died.
Helps with: What are the Eastern Catholic Churches?; Should the faith take the forms of each culture it enters?; The nation and the Church
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The New Concise History of the CrusadesThomas F. Madden, 2005 · about 250 pages · What the Crusades were, why they were fought and how they went wrong, by a leading historian of them.
Helps with: May a Christian take up the sword?; Church and state
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The Orthodox ChurchTimothy (Kallistos) Ware, 1963 · about 350 pages · The standard introduction to Eastern Orthodoxy, half history, half belief and worship, by an English convert who became a bishop.
Helps with: The procession of the Holy Spirit; The office of Peter; What is salvation for?; God's essence and His energies; What are the Eastern Catholic Churches?; Icons and images
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A Brief History of Vatican IIGiuseppe Alberigo
Helps with: The Second Vatican Council; Reform or tradition?
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A History of ChristendomWarren H. Carroll, 1985 · 6 volumes · A Catholic narrative history from the Incarnation to the twentieth century, told as the story of a civilization the faith built and had to defend. The last volume was completed by Anne Carroll.
Helps with: Church and state; The nation and the Church; Which form of government best suits a Christian people?; May a Christian take up the sword?; The office of Peter; Reform or tradition?; The Second Vatican Council
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A History of PhilosophyFrederick Copleston, SJ, 1946 · 9 volumes · The standard survey from the Greeks to the twentieth century, by a Jesuit who explains each thinker fairly before weighing him. Read the medieval volumes for the background to most questions here.
Helps with: Do natures and essences really exist?; Is 'being' said of God and of creatures in the same sense?; Where does knowledge begin?; Why is the good good?; Faith and reason: who has the last word?; Is morality objective and knowable?; Is truth objective?; What makes you this one and no other?
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Augustine of Hippo: A BiographyPeter Brown
Helps with: How does grace move the will?; How fallen is human nature?; Church and state
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Religion and the Rise of Western CultureChristopher Dawson, 1950 · about 250 pages · Dawson's Gifford Lectures on how monasteries, the papacy and the medieval Church formed Europe.
Helps with: Are the world's learning and arts a danger or a gift?; Church and state; Contemplation or action?; Reform or tradition?
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The Evolution of Medieval ThoughtDavid Knowles, 1962 · about 350 pages · A Benedictine historian's clear single-volume account of medieval philosophy, from Augustine to Ockham.
Helps with: Do natures and essences really exist?; Is 'being' said of God and of creatures in the same sense?; Why is the good good?; Faith and reason: who has the last word?; Where does knowledge begin?
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The Making of EuropeChristopher Dawson, 1932 · about 300 pages · How Roman, Christian and barbarian worlds fused into Christendom between the fourth and eleventh centuries.
Helps with: The nation and the Church; Church and state; Should the faith take the forms of each culture it enters?
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The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten StoryRoberto de Mattei
Helps with: The Second Vatican Council; Reform or tradition?; Liturgical development; Where does the Roman liturgy stand at its fullest: the old rite, the reformed, or both?
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What Happened at Vatican IIJohn W. O'Malley, SJ
Helps with: The Second Vatican Council; May the state restrain false religion?; Liturgical development; Reform or tradition?
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A Secular AgeCharles Taylor, 2007 · about 900 pages · How the West went from a world where belief was the default to one where it is one option among many.
Helps with: How is God related to the world?; Church and state; May the state restrain false religion?; Reform or tradition?
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History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle AgesÉtienne Gilson, 1955 · about 800 pages · Gilson's detailed history of how Christian thinkers from the Fathers to the fourteenth century used and changed philosophy.
Helps with: Do natures and essences really exist?; Is 'being' said of God and of creatures in the same sense?; Why is the good good?; Faith and reason: who has the last word?; What makes you this one and no other?; How does creation speak of God?
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The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of DoctrineJaroslav Pelikan, 1971 · 5 volumes · What the Church believed, taught and confessed, century by century, East and West, by a scholar who ended his life in Orthodoxy.
Helps with: Does doctrine develop?; The procession of the Holy Spirit; How are we made right with God?; How does grace move the will?; Icons and images; God's essence and His energies
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The Spirit of Mediaeval PhilosophyÉtienne Gilson
Helps with: Faith and reason: who has the last word?; Can reason know that God exists?; Are the world's learning and arts a danger or a gift?
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The Stripping of the AltarsEamon Duffy, 1992
Helps with: Liturgical development; What do the sacraments do?; How are we made right with God?
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The Unintended ReformationBrad S. Gregory, 2012 · about 600 pages · How late-medieval metaphysics and the Reformation's quarrels, without anyone meaning it, produced a secular, pluralist West.
Helps with: Is 'being' said of God and of creatures in the same sense?; How are we made right with God?; Who interprets revelation?; Is truth objective?; Church and state