Catholic Thought Leaders Share Their Summer Reading Lists| National Catholic Register
There’s something about these lazy, hazy days of summer that makes us want to get lost in a book. A classic “beach read” definitely serves its purpose, but time away from work and school can also be a time to for spiritual or intellectual renewal. And really, we have to ask ourselves, “If not now, then when?”
So, if you’re looking for ideas for books (life-changing or otherwise) to read this summer, the Register may be able to help. We’ve asked a variety Catholic writers and thinkers, among them some of our contributors, to share what they are reading this summer.
It’s not surprising that many of them have chosen challenging books that wrestle with big questions facing society or call one to a deeper relationship with God.
But fear not — there are plenty of suggestions for books that will be perfect for a day at the beach or pool!
Here’s what they told us they are reading this summer:
Bishop James Conley, Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska
I just finished reading Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. The subtitle of the book is Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, which really captures the thesis of this excellent book. Louv is the author of many non-fiction books and an acclaimed naturalist and recipient of the Audubon Medal.
Louv coined the term “nature deficit disorder” to describe the negative consequences to the health and the imaginations of children as they move more and more indoors and away from physical contact with the natural world — particularly moving away from unstructured, solitary experiences.
It’s a great follow-up to The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt, which I also read.
Both of these books are “must-reads” for parents and teachers.
I’m also reading a new biography: St. John Henry Newman: A Life Sacrificed by Ida Friederike Görres, recently translated by Jennifer S. Bryson. This acclaimed Catholic German author wrote this biography in the 1940s, but it was only translated into English and published by Ignatius Press in 2024.
As a lifelong Newman devotee, it’s fascinating to read a biography of this great saint from a German perspective during the immediate aftermath of World War II. Her treatment of Newman’s conversion and his writings on conscience are particularly insightful. When Ida Görres died in 1971, a young Father Joseph Ratzinger wrote her eulogy.
Mary FioRito, EWTN radio host and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center
For the Glory: Eric Liddell’s Journey From Olympic Champion to Modern Martyr by Duncan Hamilton. Born in China to Scottish Presbyterian missionary parents, Eric Liddell is best known for winning the gold medal in the 400 meters at the Paris Olympics in 1928, the subject of the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire.
My Scottish Catholic parents grew up hearing the stories of Liddell — not only because of his heroic sacrifice at the Olympics (he refused to run in the 100-meter dash, his strongest event, because it was held on a Sunday), but also because he is rumored to have converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, after encountering Catholic missionaries in China. While that possibility is disputed, what is not in question are Liddell’s final words: “It is all surrender.”
Msgr. Roger Landry, national director of The Pontifical Mission Societies USA
I have been reading Peter Kreeft’s autobiographical reflections, From Calvinist to Catholic, which not only gives a spiritual history of how he developed to be, in my opinion, the closest thing we have to a fusion of St. Thomas Aquinas, C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, but also puts on full display his genius in explaining and defending the truths of the faith, making us all smarter, more grateful and more capable apologists in the process.
Next in my queue is Ralph Martin’s A Life in the Spirit: A Memoir. Ralph is one of the Church’s best teachers about prayer and the interior life — as we see in the modern classic A Fulfillment of All Desire — and I can’t wait to see the stages by which the Holy Spirit led him to become such a master.
Robert George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University
Purpose by Samuel T. Wilkinson is an interdisciplinary, science-based study of human nature. It explains why we human beings are onto something in supposing that there is purpose — and therefore meaning — in our lives. The book makes an important contribution to the literature on the relationship between science and religion and faith and reason.
True Conservatism by Anthony Kronman is a philosophical argument that seeks to harmonize a concern for old-fashioned substantive values such family, community, faith, knowledge, beauty and virtue with a commitment to democracy, pluralism, tolerance and reasoned debate. Professor Kronman draws fruitfully on the greatest thinkers of the Western philosophical tradition — ancient, medieval and modern — making the book (as a sort of side benefit) a kind of introduction to philosophy.
Alberto Fernandez, former diplomat and contributor to EWTN News
This summer, I have been reading Walking With Father Vincent by Andy McNabb, writing about his great-grand uncle, the Dominican friar Father Vincent McNabb, who died in 1943.
Father Vincent was a good friend of Chesterton and Belloc, and he inspired Dorothy Day. The book spoke to me of one of the big challenges of our modern world — the growing divide between the physical and the virtual, the digital and the real. Father Vincent overcame this.
He was a “thinker” and a prolific writer but also deeply involved in the world of the real. He walked everywhere and was famed (as Belloc was) for his walking. He also spoke to and debated with thousands, face-to-face, in the defense of the faith. Here is the physical and the spiritual combined in the cause of “love and orthodoxy.”
Dominican Father Thomas Petri, former president of the Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D.C.
Recently reprinted by Ignatius Press with a new cover, I first read Fire Within: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and the Gospel on Prayer by Father Thomas Dubay.
30 years ago while I was college seminary. Now I’m reading it again with a group of friends. Dubay masterfully puts the thought of the two great Carmelite saints and doctors of the Church within reach of the reader, and in doing so demythologizes their important teachings. This has the pleasant effect of rendering contemplative prayer not only accessible to the average person, but, in fact, a necessary component of the Christian life.
I’m also reading Catherine of Siena by Sigrid Undset (originally published in 1954). Though she is a great saint and doctor of the Church, was heroic in life, and is a Dominican, I’ve never had a devotion to St. Catherine. I confess that I find it difficult to relate to some of the stranger aspects of her life and choices. (I’m sure many saints seemed to many people to be weird.) It doesn’t help that many biographies of her embellish and over-emphasize the miraculous. Nonetheless, I’m certain she intercedes for this Dominican brother of hers, despite my reticence. I think Undset’s biography is the best of the lot. She succeeds not only in revering the saint, but also in humanizing her very uncommon life for us who live more commonly.
The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell (Simon & Schuster, 2021, is a must-read for anyone who is interested in how our country — both our politics and our culture — arrived at the point we are today. Caldwell astutely traces the challenges as beginning well before the 1960s and afflicting both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. The key here is not only the oversized cultural and practical influence of the baby-boom generation, but also a seemingly inevitable march toward individualism that has both liberal and conservative modes. I highly recommend this book.
Matthew Walther, editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary magazine
I have just finished rereading the old Charles Jarvis translation of Don Quixote. How could I have forgotten so much about this book? I had remembered it as a very uneven work, in which the really amusing bits everyone recalls were crowded out by bad poetry and soporific digressions on the order of the infamous bandit interlude in The Count of Monte Cristo. This time, I was struck mainly by its sheer relentless forward momentum, comparable to Pickwick or Decline and Fall or even a Chuck Jones cartoon. Those like Nabokov or A.N. Wilson who have called Don Quixote a cruel, one-joke sort of book seem to me to have missed the point. It is, in fact, almost absurdly moving. In practically every other chapter we meet with scenes like this one, in which a parsimonious innkeeper demands that the poor saintly Don — who was under the impression that he had passed the evening at a castle — settle the dull sublunary matter of the bill:
I see little to my purpose in all this, answered the host: pay me what is my due, and let us have none of your stories and knight-errantries; for I make no account of any thing, but how to come by my own.
There is something so brutal and evocative here — the whole accumulated force of centuries of sophistry, economics and calculation hits you at once, and you feel that you are seeing laid before you everything that you have hated about the world as you have found it since you were a child.
Buy the World’s Classics paperback now before someone decides that Oxford University Press needs to commission a new “accurate” translation.
Helen Alvaré, professor of law at George Mason University
Into Your Hands Father: Abandoning Ourselves to the God Who Loves Us by Wilfred Stinissen. No matter how many times I read this book about abandoning oneself to God’s will, I discover something profoundly insightful and necessary for my life. Everyone Catholic I know is struggling to really discern God’s will, and I haven’t found a better book for the journey.
Father Josh Jonson, director of the Blessed Stanley Rother Propaedeutic Seminary House of Formation and pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church and School, Diocese of Baton Rouge, Louisiana
This summer I read The Spiritual Formation of Seminarians by Deacon James Keating. As the new director of the Blessed Stanley Rother Propaedeutic House of Formation in the Diocese of Baton Rouge, I found Keating’s emphasis on intimate and unceasing union with God both practical and profound. His insights reminded me that before we can form future priests for ministry, we must first help them fall deeply in love with Jesus Christ!
Stephen White, executive director of The Catholic Project, The Catholic University of America
I’ve been reading Ernest Hemingway — The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, along with some collected short stories and poems. Hemingway is famous for his direct, almost sparse prose. It’s a joy to read, even if his stories are marked by profound sadness, loss, and failed attempts to find meaning in a world turned upside down by the Great War. It has been almost a century since Hemingway published his first novel, and the themes of his writing are uncannily relevant to contemporary life. Reading him, one finds a comrade for facing today’s world. But his characters, like his own life, are also a cautionary tale.
Father Raymond J. de Souza, a frequent Register contributor and founding editor of Convivium magazine
Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia by Mark Bourrie. In the centennial year of the beatification of the Jesuit Martyrs, Mark Bourrie’s “secular biography” of St. Jean de Brébeuf is a timely read. It’s far from hagiography and will cause discomfort in some pious quarters, but the accomplished Canadian historian renders a respectful account, insisting that the “insensitivity, callousness and violence must be seen in the context of the times” — times which were brutally violent in Europe, as well as in Huronia, now Canada. A “secular” biography of a mystical martyr may not be entirely possible, but it can engage in conversation with a secular age.
Joseph E. Capizzi, Ph.D., dean and ordinary professor of moral theology, School of Theology and Religious Studies, The Catholic University of America
As the father of five daughters, I’ve always been drawn to Jane Austen’s Mr. Bennet, a point of comparison in the discharging of my paternal duties (lesson: Don’t expose the wife to the children’s contempt!). Pride and Prejudice was the first book in our family’s summer reading series. Every rereading reminds me of Austen’s remarkable, almost unparalleled insights into human behavior. Few authors, of philosophy, literature or even theology, match Austen in this. And the story is laugh-out-loud funny as well.
Franciscan Father Dave Pivonka, president of Franciscan University of Steubenville
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. I found a lot of spirituality in this book. It explores beautiful themes that explore insights for living the spiritual life.
Two things I took from this book are the power of sacrificial love and the fact that no matter how insignificant we believe our lives are from a worldly perspective, we all make great impact from the eternal perspective. The section on the power of sacrificial love resonated with me because I know the author adopted a very sick child from Haiti who later died. The book illustrates the spiritual truth that without sacrifice, there is no love.
Kathryn Jean Lopez, senior fellow at the National Review Institute, where she directs the Center for Religion, Culture, and Civil Society, and religion editor of National Review
I saw an early copy of The Hour of Testing: Spiritual Depth and Insight in a Time of Ecclesial Uncertainty by Father Donald Haggerty and immediately wanted to spend weeks with it. I do not exaggerate. This is not Father Haggerty’s first rodeo. His books (all with Ignatius Press — the late Pope Benedict XVI’s publisher in English, not too shabby) on prayer and the contemplative life are best as retreat leaders. And one of the treasures of these books is that you do not have to find a retreat center that’s not already overbooked or the possible miracle of time in your schedule. Just about every paragraph, short or long, can be considered a meditation in itself — something to spend quality time with in prayer.
And just one other summer-reading thought: You may have heard that there is a new, long-awaited, near-1,000-word biography on William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review magazine (where I’ve worked for nearly three decades). When he died in 2008, George Weigel told me immediately, without hesitation: “Bill Buckley may have been the most publicly influential U.S. Catholic of the 20th century; he would certainly be on any serious list of the top five.”
Bill had a tremendous gift for mentoring and friendship, and one who was blessed by this was pianist Lawrence Perelman, who has written a much-quicker, delightful read, American Impresario: William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Elements of American Character. You won’t regret getting to it — it’s a refreshing breeze of a book in a world where near-everything is ideological. This is just humanity at its daily — albeit high-functioning, even in his later years — best.
Leah Libresco Sargeant, author and family-policy analyst
Damion Searls’ The Philosophy of Translation is a tender book. Searls sees translation as deeply relational work, figuring out how to help the author and reader meet across a linguistic gap. Searls’ care for this connection reminds us that every book is the sudden jump of a spark between the soul of author and reader.
Dr. Grazie Christie, a physician, writer and member of the Florida State Board of Education
Summer is a time for leisure and rest, even in reading. But a fun novel can also be good for one’s spiritual life. To that purpose, I’m reading the novels of Graham Greene, and I’ve started with The Power and the Glory. His work is gritty and exciting, but there is an honest confrontation in it, between the harshness of our human limitations and the tremendous mercy of God. That is how novels should be written.
