The Summer Reading List, 2025 Edition

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Some years ago, a friend teaching at a state university told me that he was offering a course on the history of baseball. I asked him for his syllabus, thinking there might be books on it I’d like to read. “What did you say?” he asked. “Books,” I replied. He laughed and said that if his syllabus included more than one book and one article, no one would register for the course.

This is not good for civilization.

So in memory of those halcyon high school days when I was assigned at least five (often very large) books to read each summer, I offer the 2025 edition of my annual Summer Reading List.

Two volumes of The Revolution Trilogy by Rick Atkinson are now available, and I can think of no better preparatory reading for next year’s America-250 semiquincentennial than The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 and The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780. Our national ignorance of our national history is appalling, and a deep dive into the years that forged a nation may help us repair our currently tattered civil culture.

U.S. Catholics are typically unaware of the Church’s often-stormy history in these United States, a familiarity with which might help blunt Chicken Little analyses of our current Catholic circumstance. St. Augustine’s Press has done American Catholicism a great service with the publication of The World and Work of Father John J. Burke: A Mystic in Action, by Douglas Slawson. Largely forgotten today, Father Burke virtually created modern U.S. Catholicism’s national structure and our engagement with public life. His story is worth learning — and then pondering for its 21st-century lessons.

Time after time, in Rome between April 22 and May 19, someone (often eminent) would sigh and say, “I wish George Pell were here.” Various facets of that extraordinary personality are nicely captured in Remembering George Cardinal Pell: Recollections of a Great Man of the Church, compiled by Tracey Rowland and published by Ignatius Press. Cardinal Thomas Collins ably sums up my old friend’s continuing relevance to the Church that, as Pell’s tombstone has it, he loved vehemently: “We are sent to evangelize, not to be colonized by current intellectual trends, no matter how dominant they are…”

As my colleague Ryan Anderson puts it in his foreword to my colleague Nathanael Blake’s book, Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All, Nathanael is not afraid of being pilloried as a “professional prude.” That’s because he understands how the dumbing down of sex into a contact sport has wreaked untold personal, societal, and cultural damage. It’s a book by a Protestant that should be given to anyone who’s afraid of being castigated as a “Catholic culture warrior.”       

Jim Billington helped bring me to Washington forty-one years ago, so I’m perhaps a suspect witness in claiming that he was the most consequential Librarian of Congress ever. His herculean efforts to put that great institution to work in helping repair the damage done to Russia by seven decades of communist intellectual and political barbarism were not successful, as John Van Oudenaren describes, often in an elegiac key, in The Geopolitics of Culture: James Billington, the Library of Congress, and the Failed Quest for a New Russia. But the effort was nobly intended and the reasons for its ultimate failure teach important lessons about Vladimir Putin’s Russia — and why its aggression must be stopped, if Russia is ever to experience true cultural and political renewal.

Fulton Sheen continues to fascinate many Catholics today. In Prophet of Hope, Derek Rotty puts the original televangelist into imaginary (and imaginative) dialogue with eight culture influencers in modern America — John Dewey, H.L. Mencken, Henry Luce, Margaret Mead, B.F. Skinner, Jack Kerouac, Betty Friedan, and Michael Harrington. The result demonstrates that the Catholic vision of the human person and the good society can more than hold its own against all comers.

In previous of these lists, I’ve recommended Bishop Robert Barron’s Light from Light: A Theological Reflection on the Nicene Creed, first published in 2021. Now, for this year’s 1,700th anniversary of the first ecumenical council, Bishop Barron is offering a somewhat briefer version of that superb work in What Christians Believe: Understanding the Nicene Creed. Both books are spiritually nourishing while providing readers with a deeper understanding of the inner architecture of Catholic faith.  

And given events in the Middle East, permit me to recommend my latest book, Pomp, Circumstance, and Unsolicited Advice: Commencement Addresses and University Lectures, and particularly its last chapter on the much misunderstood just war tradition.