Recommended Reading for 2005
by Father John McCloskey
Spending a year in Britain writing a book on evangelization and preparing a television series on Thomas More does give a different perspective on the world than from working on K Street within the Beltway. The most important book of the year is Who Are We? by Samuel Huntington (Simon and Schuster). Huntington asks all the right questions about the future course of our country and even gives some of the right answers. He just hasn't read properly his Tocqueville.
I would also recommend James Webb, novelist, former Secretary of the Navy, and war hero's book Born Fighting (Broadway Books). He writes a terrific part-history, part-sociology, part-autobiography book on the most neglected ethnic group, the Scots-Irish. They gave us Andrew Jackson, Douglas MacArthur, and Merle Haggard, among many others. Wonder why Bush won Ohio? Read it.
I would also recommend Sarge (Smithsonian Books) by Scott Stossel. Sargent Shriver is one of the great men of honest ideals and faith in America of the last century. It could have been subtitled "The Last Real Catholic Democrat". Imagine the genetic inheritance of Maria and Arnold's children!
Know thy enemy. For that, read The Sword of the Prophet by Serge Trifkovic (Regina Orthodox Prophet). The book increased my knowledge of radical Islam by 90 percent. It has been waging war against the West, off and on, since the seventh century, but atomic bombs are a lot more dangerous than scimitars. More than increased defense spending will be necessary to defend ourselves.
Decadent Europe has very few private universities and even fewer with a religious orientation. Read Naomi Schaeffer's God in the Quad (St. Martin's Press) for a concise on-the-spot examination of several small and not-so small religious universities and colleges in the U.S. that provide faith-based liberal arts- education. They are a welcome alternative to both public and elitist valueless mega-universities. There are dozens of them and most of them work. They actually there believe is no contradiction between faith and reason and that it is possible to be both virtuous and a college student.
Getting more personal, after having walked the streets of London and it outlying districts tracing the footsteps of the greatest Englishman of the last 500 years (pace Winston Churchill), St. Thomas More, I would recommend the new A Thomas More Source Book (Catholic University of America Press) edited by Gerard B. Wegemer and Stephen W. Smith. It is the best one-volume introduction and overview of the Patron Saint of Statesman and Politicians.
And finally, read the most cogent sociological analysis of American Catholicism, The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church (Sophia Institute Press) by David Carlin. What, however, he does not see nor understand is its new dawn in the decades ahead. For that, you will have to read my new book, Good News, Bad News, Evangelization, Conversion, and the Crisis of Faith, coming out this spring from Sophia Institute Press.
