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.
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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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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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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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?