Books on Culture

A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning Is secularism a positive force in the modern world? Or does it lead to fragmentation and disintegration? In Saving Leonardo, best-selling award-winning author Nancy Pearcey (Total Truth, coauthor How Now Shall We Live?) makes a compelling case that secularism is destructive and dehumanizing. Pearcey depicts the revolutionary thinkers and artists, the ideas and events, leading step by step to the unleashing of secular worldviews...

A Harvard graduate, Rhodes Scholar, and devout Catholic tells you everything you need to know about keeping your faith at a modern university. Drawing on her recent experience, Aurora Griffin shares forty practical tips relating to academics, community, prayer, and service that helped her stay Catholic in college.She reminds us that keeping the faith is a conscious decision, reinforced by commitment to daily practices. Aurora's story illustrates that when you decide your faith matters to you,...

The Catholic Faith possesses a treasury of devotions, prayers, and rituals to draw us deeper into the spiritual life. Among these gifts, sacramentals hold a unique and vital place in the lives of all who seek God's grace. From rosaries and crucifixes to medals and relics, from bells and candles to salts and scapulars, these seemingly ordinary signs, when woven into our everyday lives, sanctify us and better prepare us to "receive the fruit of the sacraments" (CCC 1677). Compendium of Sacramen...

Hold on to your horses and get ready for the ride of your life! World Champion surfer Bear Woznick connects us to that deep call in every man's heart to live the heroic way and champion a cause greater than himself. Bear reveals ways to become an everyday hero, someone who goes beyond the ordinary in the little and big moments of life, who rides high in the saddle, rides for the brand, come hell or high water, and pursues God's call in his life. Cowboys and manliness fit together like a well-...

Prefect of the Papal Household Archbishop Georg Ganswein presents a stirring defense of Catholic theology, Church tradition, and the primacy of the Catholic Faith in his much-anticipated American book debut, How the Catholic Church Can Restore Our Culture. As one of the most distinguished figures in the Catholic Church and the only man to have been in daily interaction with two popes simultaneously, Archbishop Ganswein presents an array of profound observations about the state of the Church a...

"Mysteries Made Visible: Praying the Rosary with Sacred Art" by Lawrence Lew, O.P., offers a unique devotional experience that combines sacred art with the contemplation of the Rosary's Mysteries. With a foreword by the Master of the Order, Fr. Gerard Francisco Timoner III, O.P., this book invites readers to deepen their prayer life through the visual and spiritual meditation on sacred images. Fr. Lew, a Dominican friar known for his photography, captures the essence of each Mystery with stun...

"Let Beauty Speak: The Art of Being Human in a Culture of Noise" by Jimmy Mitchell is a timely book that empowers Christians to evangelize the world by bringing beauty to the forefront of their lives. Drawing from personal stories and rich theology, Mitchell offers ten principles for living out humanity well, inspired by the beauty of holiness found in the lives of the saints. Each chapter concludes with practical tips, making this book a guide for anyone looking to transform their day-to-day...

"Building a Civilization of Love: A Catholic Response to Racism" by Harold Burke-Sivers is a profound exploration of addressing racism from a Catholic Christian perspective. Grounded in Scriptures, natural law, Church Tradition, and our identity as God's children, the book offers a spiritual and deeply insightful approach to combatting the epidemic of racism. Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers, an internationally renowned speaker and author, provides a compelling argument for a response to racism tha...

This is a memoir, yes, fictionalized (as all of them are in some way) because the facts don't matter nearly as much here as the Holy Spirit who moves the furniture, the physical world, and everything in it. This unvarnished book tries to do more than offer a happy or easy conversion. It foregrounds the Beat movement too, a movement that has long been way station and home to many excellent Catholic poets. The list is a long one: Kerouac, Merton, Everson, Fabilli, Berrigan, Baxter, Kavanagh, Le...

"A sequel of sorts to Bradley Birzer's Beyond Tenebrae (Angelico Press, 2019), Mythic Realms seeks to pursue excellences in the last hundred years of literature and film. Still rooted in Christian Humanism and Burke's moral imagination, Birzer offers here a series of autobiographical vignettes, following which he analyzes fiction from Willa Cather to J.R.R. Tolkien to Stephen King to Frank Miller, and considers everything from the novel to the graphic novel. From the world of film he explores...

The Collected Works of Carol Jackson Robinson, Volume 1 From the Foreword: In Designs for Christian Living, Carol Jackson Robinson practices what she preaches. Designs is not primarily a theological work but an essay into what Catholics can do in the here and now to begin the transformation of society. Interestingly, Robinson does not propose the formation of Catholic political parties or movements; she avoids the fallacy of urging the erection of a political house on the foundation of a cult...

Nine Tasks for Every Catholic Revitalizing Catholicism in America provides nine practical action items every faithful Catholic can undertake - nine steps which form the building blocks of a renewed Catholic subculture. No matter what your specific gift or walk of life, you have a role to play in revitalizing Catholicism in America. This book will show you how.

New Nations and a Transatlantic Discourse of Empire Why is the capital of the United States named in part after Christopher Columbus, a Genoese explorer commissioned by Spain who never set foot on what would become the nation's mainland? Why did Spanish American nationalists in 1819 name a new independent republic "Colombia," after Columbus, the first representative of the empire from which they had recently broken free? These are only two of the introductory questions explored in The Lega...

Writing of his real-life pilgrimage on the Camino, Nick Maione offers sharp-eyed detail and characterization, incisive poetic image, humor, and wisdom.

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words,...

​"Suppose for a moment that Catholicism had been dead for centuries, that the traditions of its worship had been lost. Only the unspeaking and forlorn cathedrals remain; they have become unintelligible yet remain admirable." So begins Marcel Proust's Death Comes for the Cathedrals (La mort des cathédrales), originally published in Le Figaro (1904). Proust addresses the political and religious debate concerning the "the Briand bill," a parliamentary proposal which imperiled the fate of French ...

An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time At eighty-five, Jacques Maritain, the most distinguished Catholic philosopher of the twentieth century, has written what he offers as his last book, and it turns out to be a shocker. The "peasant," as Maritain calls himself in the title, is a man who calls a spade a spade; and a storm of controversy descended immediately on the book's publication in France, as both Right and Left reeled from the force of Maritain's criticism.The Peasant ...

The Collapse and Revival of American Community Updated to include a new chapter about the influence of social media and the Internet--the 20th anniversary edition of Bowling Alone remains a seminal work of social analysis, and its examination of what happened to our sense of community remains more relevant than ever in today's fractured America. Twenty years, ago, Robert D. Putnam made a seemingly simple observation: once we bowled in leagues, usually after work; but no longer. This seemingly...

St Benedict and the European Future St. Benedict has been called the Father of Western Monasticism and Patron of Europe. In this masterful work, Christopher Derrick brings forward the relevance of the values in the Rule of St. Benedict for the temporal as well as the spiritual future of the Western world.

What Old Books Can Tell Us (And Warn Us) About Living in the 21st Century Fake news, genetic engineering, designer babies, Big Pharma, incipient totalitarian rule, the destruction of books, transhumanism, the desire to play God, and the serial misuse of the word "science"-it may sound a lot like America in the 2020s, but these politically charged modern concerns have been probed deeply in classic fiction by a host of prescient authors over the past two centuries. The Art of Being Human draws ...

St. Cecilia's, Brooklyn, 1871-1930 Here, in these pages, first published in 1931, is the story of the first sixty years of St. Cecilia's parish in Brooklyn, NY. Under the stewardship of Msgr. Edward McGolrick (1857-1938), an impressive network of social support that touched practically every aspect of a parishioner's life was built: a maternity hospital, a daycare center (the first of its kind in the country!), the largest Catholic parochial school building in America, a sports facility for h...

From the Medieval Bank to Financial Globalization This book, perhaps startlingly, is about finance from a Christian point of view, taking its start from the Gospels and moving forward to modern Catholic Social Teaching and today's opaque money markets, pausing along the way to delve into the origins of finance in the Christian Middle Ages. Not only those with a Christian orientation, but anyone looking for a coherent, moral view of finance will profit from its keen insights. Markets represent...

A Historical Study It may be useless to deny that most of the West functions under the reign of capitalism, but despite this fact the question of the origin of this paradigm and how it came to such a prominent position in our society remains unclear. This is the vital question.  Religion and the Rise of Capitalism aims to address. In what has proven something of a minor classic, R. H. Tawney sets his sights high, returning to the Middle Ages to examine the history of both capitalism and reli...

Passages From the Writings of Eric Gill Eric Gill (1882-1940) is well known as a sculptor, wood and stone carver, letter, engraver, typeface designer, and graphic artist. But he was also a radical religious and social philosopher-a Christian revolutionary-for whom "life was more than art," because it was the highest art, the art of being human. Thus his interests were never theoretical and his view of life was holistic, involving the whole person in a unity of art, work and spiritual values. ...

Liturgy, Education, and Inspiration for Family, School, and College In The Way of Beauty, David Clayton describes how a true Catholic education is both a program of liturgical catechesis and an inculturation that aims for the supernatural transformation of the person so that he can in turn transfigure the whole culture through the divine beauty of his daily action. There is no human activity, no matter how mundane, that cannot be enhanced by this formation in beauty. Such enhanced activity th...