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The 2021 Summer Reading List

Some suggestions for summer enrichment, ranging from biographies to histories to works of fiction.

(Image: Aaron Burden/Unsplash.com)

Liberation from lockdowns and quarantines ought not be liberation from serious reading, opportunities for which being one of the few boons of the recent past. Here are some suggestions for summer enrichment.

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, OFM Cap., may have retired from the tasks of episcopal governance, but he certainly hasn’t abandoned the fields where the battle for decency is being contested. To some bears of little brain, this makes him a “culture-warrior;” to those with more discernment, it makes him a bishop-teacher in the great tradition of churchmen like Charles Borromeo and Francis de Sales. Things Worth Dying For: Thoughts on a Life Worth Living (Henry Holt) is the latest contribution to a serious Catholic consideration of our present moment, its discontents and possibilities, from this model bishop.

Catholic priests have taken a beating in both popular culture and the Church in recent decades. All the more reason, then, to celebrate the life and accomplishment of a priest who spent out his life for the poorest of the Lord’s poor in some of the toughest parts of the Third World. In Priest and Beggar: The Heroic Life of Venerable Aloysius Schwartz (Ignatius Press), Kevin Wells tells the extraordinary story of a Washington native, “Father Al,” who displayed a distinctively American form of sanctity as he walked the Way of the Cross throughout his ministry and in his suffering from Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

How did the Calvert family, founders of the Catholic colony of Maryland, and the Carroll family, who gave America its first bishop and its sole Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, navigate the rocks and shoals of anti-Catholic British penal laws and absurdly expansive Roman notions of the papacy’s role in civil affairs? Michael D. Breidenbach sheds new light on that fascinating question in Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America (Harvard University Press), an original, provocative contribution to the study of U.S. Catholic history.

 Erika Bachiochi is, like Michael Breidenbach, a former student of mine, of whom my colleagues and I in the Cracow-based Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society are very proud. In The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision (University of Notre Dame Press), legal scholar Bachiochi, a mother of seven, builds an intellectual bridge across the generations of feminist thought from Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Ann Glendon; offers a bracing critique of various currents in contemporary feminist theory, including the autonomy-driven thought of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg; and thereby makes an important contribution to thoughtful reflection on contemporary American culture and society.

Yes, I read novels occasionally. One to which I’ve returned several times since it was assigned for summer reading in 1967 is Paul Horgan’s masterful tale of the settlement of what’s now Arizona, A Distant Trumpet (Nonpareil Books). The author anticipated Larry McMurtry in giving us the Old West without gloss; what Horgan added to the mix in A Distant Trumpet was a keen insight into what it means to grow into manhood and what loyalty to moral principle means — and can cost. Paul Horgan never wore his Catholicism on his literary sleeve, but the Catholic sacramental imagination shaped his fiction nonetheless.

Father Robert Imbelli is an adornment of the American Catholic theological scene. Friends recently honored his 80th birthday with a book, The Center Is Jesus Christ Himself: Essays on Revelation, Salvation, and Evangelization in Honor of Robert P. Imbelli (Catholic University of America Press). The title is an apt summary of Father Imbelli’s theological project, which has always aimed at deepening his students’ and readers’ love for the Lord.

We say it so often that the prayer Jesus gave us risks becoming mere routine. Father John Gavin, SJ, makes the greatest of prayers come alive again with the help of the Fathers of the Church in Mysteries of the Lord’s Prayer: Wisdom from the Early Church (Catholic University of America Press).

The first two volumes of Cardinal George Pell’s Prison Journal (Ignatius Press) have introduced a world audience to the truth about an oft-caricatured man: that he is a Christian hero whose grace under extraordinary pressure was and is rooted in his profound faith. The third volume, due out in October, will complete a remarkable trilogy that, in the ways of Providence, grew out of a grave injustice.

I’m pleased that many people have told me that they’ve found my Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences of, a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of Them Admirable (Ignatius Press) “encouraging” in these challenging times. I hope you will, too.


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About George Weigel 483 Articles
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. He is the author of over twenty books, including Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (1999), The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (2010), and The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform. His most recent books are The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission (2020), Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences of, a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of Them Admirable (Ignatius, 2021), and To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books, 2022).

5 Comments

  1. And if you have not yet read E. Michael Jones’ epic, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, the second edition is now out. The greatest history book ever.

  2. Road to Valor by Alli and Andres McConnon A true story of a cyclist who won the Tour of France twice, 10 years apart, and used his bike to save the Jews without the knowledge of his wife.

  3. Recommended reading on the best sellers list: Mark Levin’s book AMERICAN MARXISM It has sold over one million copies in America since Last month. He is a talk radio host of Levin TV and host of the Fox News show Life Liberty and Levin.

  4. To go through life and having not read “The Power and the Glory” by Graham Greene would be a huge disappointment. He understand sin, probably because he lived it. His biography is certainly that of a very undesirable person and to paraphrase his own words, only a God could have died for the likes of Graham Greene.

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