Acton's Bookshelf

In response to the question about "reading myself into the Church..."

In this most recent episode on Dignity, I mentioned that while Chris Arnade had “read himself out of the Catholic Church,” George and I have been reading ourselves into the Catholic Church. Listener Windy Braune posted a great question in the comments: “As someone who is also having the experience of reading myself into the church, I’d love a master list of the books that inspired you both!”

Rather than post an unbelievably long comment, I thought I’d make a new post with my personal list, since others might also be interested. It’s probably waaaay more than Windy bargained for (though you did say “master list”…).

These books reveal my particular preoccupations and questions (on suffering, death, evolution, symbolism, and sex), as well as my background in evangelicalism, which may well differ from that of our listeners. But hopefully something on here will spark your interest! Who doesn’t love a rabbit trail?

Here’s my bookshelf:

Symbolism/Liturgy/Psychology/Embodiment (kind of one thing?)

• The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis (Pageau)

• The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth (Harding)

• The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (McGilchrist)

• The Ethics of Beauty (Patitsas)

• Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (Peterson)

• Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Boersma)

• Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral (Long)

• The Origins and History of Consciousness (Neumann)

• The Logic of the Body: Retrieving Theological Psychology (LaPine)

• Liturgy and Personality (Von Hildebrand)

• The Psyche as Sacrament: A Comparative Study of C.G. Jung and Paul Tillich (Dourley)

• Evangelical Is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament (Howard)

• Theology of the Icon, Vol 1 (Ouspensky)

• For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Schmemann)

• In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity (Pieper)

Theology & Evolution

• Finding Ourselves After Darwin: Conversation on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil (Rosenberg)

• Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life (Haught)

• God, Evolution, and Animal Suffering: Theodicy Without a Fall (Sollereder)

• The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil (Southgate)

• The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate (Volume 1) (Walton)

• The Phenomenon of Man (Teilhard de Chardin)

Catholic Theology/Apologetics

• The Early Church Was Catholic (Heschmeyer)

• The Case for Catholicism: Answers to Classic and Contemporary Protestant Objections (Horn)

• Orthodoxy (Chesterton)

• Rock and Sand: An Orthodox Appraisal of the Protestant Reformers and Their Teachings (Trenham)

• “All Shall Be Well”: Explorations in Universal Salvation and Christian Theology, from Origen to Moltmann (MacDonald)

• That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (Hart)

• Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar (Griffiths)

• Christianity and Culture (T.S. Eliot)

• The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Hart)

Church History

• The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Gregory)

• Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Worthen)

• The Story of Christianity (Hart) — this has as many pictures as words!

• The Story of Christianity: Vol 1, The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation (Gonzalez)

• The Story of Christianity: Vol 2, The Reformation to the Present Day (Gonzalez)

• A Secular Age (Taylor)

• How Not to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Smith)

• The Discarded Image (The medieval worldview) (C.S. Lewis)

• History and Presence (Catholicism in America) (Orsi)

Theology of Sex

• The Authority of Women in the Catholic Church (Miller)

• A Mother’s Rule of Life: How to Bring Order to Your Home and Peace to Your Soul (Pierlot)

• The Structure of Theological Revolutions: How the Fight Over Birth Control Transformed American Catholicism (Massa)

• Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Noonan)

• Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Tentler)

• The Catholic Case for Contraception (Callahan)

• Turning Point: The Inside Story of the Papal Birth Control Commission, and How Humana Vitae Changed the Life of Patty Crowley and the Future of the Church (McClory)

• The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory (Favale)

• Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (Pelikan)

• Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage: Human Marriage as the Image and Sacrament of the Marriage of God and Creation (Levering)

• The Experience of Marriage: The Testimony of Catholic Laymen (Novak)

Saints Writings/Prayer/Devotional

• The Roots of Christian Mysticism (Clement)

• The Little Oratory: A Beginner's Guide to Praying in the Home (Clayton)

• The Divine Hours (Tickle)

• Augustine’s Confessions

• On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ (St. Maximus the Confessor)

• Revelations of Divine Love (Julian of Norwich)

• A Severe Mercy (A spiritual autobiography of love and grief) (Vanauken)

• Creation in Christ (George MacDonald’s unspoken sermons)

• Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (Cayley)

• Anything and everything by Ivan Illich

• Magnificat monthly prayer guides following the liturgical calendar

Fiction

• Laurus (Vodolazkin)

• Godric (Buechner)

• Kristin Lavransdatter (Undset)

• Brideshead Revisited (Waugh)

• The Power and the Glory (Green)

• Till We Have Faces (Lewis)

• The Book of the Dun Cow (Wangerin)

• The Sparrow, and Children of God (Jesuits in space! What could be cooler?) (Russell)

• The Screwtape Letters (Lewis)

• A Canticle for Liebowitz (Miller)

• Poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Magazines

• New Polity

• First Things

• Orthodox Arts Journal and especially the work of Jonathan Pageau on symbolism

A parting word: the most powerful, convincing, life-changing aspect of the Church wasn’t anything I read in a book. It was the liturgy. It’s the experience of participating in the Mass and receiving the Eucharist. It’s the symbolic enacted drama, the communal ritual, the embodied worship. That is what drew me in and keeps me in. The books fill in the backstory, address my questions, give me words to rationally metabolize. But the books are only part of the path. The point—the destination—is liturgical. It is not so much read as lived.

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Off the Shelf features book ruminations, recommendations, and reviews.

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