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!

The latest episode of Controversies in Church History takes a look at the early 19th century writer and apologist Francois Rene Chateaubriand (1768-1848), and his work, The Genius of Christianity. Often considered one of the first "Romantic" authors, we will take a look at Chateaubriand's life and background and how it shaped his approach to arguing for the truth of the Catholic faith.

The latest episode of Controversies in Church History covers a curious topic and debate among academics. Why are modern Western societies so different from other civilizations? Why are they WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) when so much of the world is not? In this episode, we take a look at the thesis that the medieval Church's prohibitions on marriage paved the way for changes in social structure that account for the modern West's WEIRDness, and why the Church insisted on those prohibitions in the first place.

Hello everyone! The latest installment in our series on the Latinization of the Eastern Churches is now available to all of our listeners. In it, we discuss the conflict between the Latin rite bishops of the United States in the late nineteenth century and the immigrant clergy of the Ruthenian Catholic Church, which resulted in the defection of tens of thousands of Ruthenian Catholics to Orthodoxy.

The latest Catholic Lives episode, in which we look at notable non-saints in Catholic history, delves into the brief life of Baldwin IV, King of Jerusalem (1174-1185). Famous for contracting leprosy when he was a child, he fought multiple battles with the Muslim emir Saladin, and successfully protected the kingdom while he lived. Face with particularly difficult personal, political and diplomatic challenges, Baldwin IV earned the praise of contemporaries, and continues to fascinate today.