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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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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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
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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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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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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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 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 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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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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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 Stripping of the AltarsEamon Duffy, 1992
Helps with: Liturgical development; What do the sacraments do?; How are we made right with God?