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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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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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
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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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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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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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
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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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 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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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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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 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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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