Controversies in Church History is back! The first episode of 2025 is a review of the books I've been reading the past year, featuring some interesting works on theology and liturgy with a side dollop of nothing-to-do-with-Catholicism-in-particular. If you like hearing someone's else's opinions about books you've never read, this is the episode for you. Also, I preview upcoming episodes and lament how behind I am on book reviews. Cheers!

Books Discussed:

1. Peter Kwasniewski, Treasuring the Goods of Marriage in a Throwaway Society

2. Abbé Claude Barthe, A Forest of Symbols: the Traditional Mass and its Meaning

3. Peter Kwasniewski, Ultramontanism and Tradition: the Role of Papal Authority in the Catholic Church

4. Erick Ybarra, The Papacy: Revisiting the Debate Between Catholic and Orthodox

5. Evelyn Waugh, Men at Arms (Sword of Honor Trilogy #1)

6. Tim Blanning, The Romantic Revolution

7. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

8. David Grann, The Wager: a Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

9. Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon

10. Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah: a Short History

11. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

12. Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

13. Ilan Pappé, A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

14. Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: the Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassination Program

This episode is a special one, as I present you with a Controversies in Church History interview, normally reserved for patrons of the podcast. Here is our interview author and apologist Erick Ybarra. We discuss his book The Papacy: Revisiting the Debate Between Catholics and Orthodox, the state of the evidence for papal claims in the first millennium and much more. Enjoy!

Just a brief preview of some upcoming events I am involved in the next month or so, including the next Controversies in Church History interview. Cheers!