Looking for a list of Catholic books worth reading

[Shin]

For Catholic Biblical scholarship…

Go to the saints… St. Thomas Aquinas’s Golden Chain, Fr. Haydock’s Old and New Testament Commentaries, Cornelius a Lapide’s Commentaries… these are all available online as well as for purchase…

 

[manygift1spirit]

Lots of good suggestions here - everyone that I too have read, I can plug for.

For a quick read that will knock your socks off, read the Introduction to Matthew Kelly’s Rediscovering Catholicism. It’s only 5 or 6 pages, and it will change forever how you view your faith.

 

[Windfish]

The OP asked for Catholic related books. I would think that anyone interested in Catholicism would be interested in the scholarly consensus on the scriptures and how they were assembled and what we know about them based on the ancient manuscripts available to us. Perhaps there is another biblical scholar you’d recommend? I’ve only ever read non-Catholic academics such as Erhman, Marcus Borg, and E.P. Sanders.

If I may point out something to you about Ehrman. The man is very, VERY misleading. For example, he commonly asserts that the Bible we have now has over hundreds of thousands of changes and variants, but what he doesn’t tell you is that most (almost all) of the variants only involve minor things like punctuation (which should be obvious given the differences in language). No ancient historical document enjoys greater purity than the Bible, which we know to be 99% faithful to the original manuscripts. Here is another of his omissions: he says that there are so many discrepancies between the Gospel accounts. Setting aside the fact that most can be harmonized and a few are actually not discrepancies at all, the Gospels are like other ancient historiography works in that they arrange their content along totally different criteria than modern historiography. We arrange the order of events chronologically, but the ancients arranged the order of events along things like significance, themes, etc.

I cannot tell you how many times I have had to correct so many people spouting Ehrman, but the damage is done. They cannot be convinced otherwise even when I show them the incontrovertible evidence.

 

[Windfish]

I would recommend you read a professional academic’s approach to the scriptures such as Bart D Erhman’s Jesus, Interrupted.

amazon.com/Jesus-Interrupted-Revealing-Hidden-Contradictions/dp/0061173940/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278884490&sr=8-1-spell

I should have quoted this one, Leela, sorry. His books have mislead so many people, it is tragic. By the way, his professional credentials are good in one sense but questionable in another:

Bart Ehrman is both a gifted writer and a gifted lecturer. Perhaps his best gift is the ability to distill difficult and complex material down to a level that undergraduates and ordinary lay folk can understand. It is thus understandable that his popular level books on the New Testament and cognate subjects have been well and widely read, and in age disposed to ‘dis’ the Bible anyway, which is to say, in a generally Biblically illiterate age, Bart’s work has been seen as confirming suspicions already long held by the skeptical or those prone to be skeptical about the Bible and Christianity.

One of the problems however with some of Bart’s popular work, including this book, is that it does not follow the age old adage— “before you boil down, you need to have first boiled it up”. By this I mean Bart Ehrman, so far as I can see, and I would be glad to be proved wrong about this fact, has never done the necessary laboring in the scholarly vineyard to be in a position to write a book like Jesus, Interrupted from a position of long study and knowledge of New Testament Studies.He has never written a scholarly monograph on NT theology or exegesis. He has never written a scholarly commentary on any New Testament book whatsoever! His area of expertise is in textual criticism, and he has certainly written works like The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, which have been variously reviewed, not to mention severely critiqued by other textual critics such as Gordon D. Fee, and his own mentor Bruce Metzger (whom I also did some study with). He is thus, in the guild of the Society of Biblical Literature a specialist in text criticism, but even in this realm he does not represent what might be called a majority view on such matters.
It is understandable how a textual critic might write a book like Misquoting Jesus, on the basis of long study of the underpinnings of textual criticism and its history and praxis. It is mystifying however why he would attempt to write a book like Jesus, Interrupted which frankly reflect no in-depth interaction at all with exegetes, theologians, and even most historians of the NT period of whatever faith or no faith at all. A quick perusal of the footnotes to this book, reveal mostly cross-references to Ehrman’s earlier popular works, with a few exceptions sprinkled in—for example Raymond Brown and E.P Sanders, the former long dead, the latter long retired. What is especially telling and odd about this is Bart does not much reflect a knowledge of the exegetical or historical study of the text in the last thirty years. It’s as if he is basing his judgments on things he read whilst in Princeton Seminary. And that was a long time ago frankly.

The reason I am so angry is because I have had to spend much of my money buying other books to show his to be bogus! I could have bought more video-games!