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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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?
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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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 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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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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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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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 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