Book Reviews – December 2025

From Calvinist to Catholic. By Peter Kreeft. Reviewed by Peter A. Huff. (skip to review)

Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States. By David J. Endres, ed. Reviewed by Aaron Martin. (skip to review)

A Thousand Pounds: Finding the Strength to Live and Love Under the Weight of Unbearable Loss. By Brianne Edwards. Reviewed by Fr. Anthony Lusvardi, S.J. (skip to review)

Essential Eucharistic Adoration Prayers. By Marie Paul Curley, FSP. Reviewed by Lawrence Montz. (skip to review)

The Prayer List: …and Other True Stories of How Families Pray. By Jane Knuth. Reviewed by Lawrence Montz. (skip to review)

From Calvinist to Catholic – Peter Kreeft

Kreeft, Peter. From Calvinist to Catholic. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2025. 192 pages.

Reviewed by Peter A. Huff.

Christians have been evangelizing, catechizing, and confessing in first-person for centuries. The irony of transmitting objective truth through the subjective mode is at the heart of much of Christianity’s greatest literature and is arguably a result of the incarnational principle at the heart of Christianity itself. Spiritual autobiography, especially the conversion narrative, does what no summa, sermon, or even encyclical can achieve. Emily Dickinson reminds us that good poetry tells prose truth slant. The personal conversion story, also by nature oblique, shows us life-transforming truth discovered the way everybody discovers it in real time: one truth after another.

Peter Kreeft, well known for his public contributions to philosophy and apologetics, enters this venerable, and curiously public, private endeavor with this long-awaited account of his transition from Reformed Christianity to Roman Catholicism. It is also a record of how he became the sort of philosopher he is. Like C. S. Lewis, he chafes at the “suffocatingly subjective” (7) quality of personal narrative. The persona encountered in the text, however, is no shrinking violet. The academy provides hospitable refuge for introverts who blossom on the lecture hall stage. Never shy about connecting philosophy with vocation, Kreeft puts his life on display in the pages of this book. He operates with a sense of obligation to give a reason not just for his hope and faith but for the unpredictable and unrepeatable shape of his life and career.

The book traces his nearly four-score and ten years, giving attention to the Dutch Protestant environment that nurtured him in his New Jersey childhood. It especially concentrates on the crucial choices defining his undergraduate experience at Calvin College and the period of his graduate work at Yale and Fordham, during which he first received the Catholic sacraments. Nine chapters of narrative are followed by eleven of apologetics and critique, which then lead to ten more of narrative, culminating with a glance toward the future and a nod to Cardinal Sarah’s “God or nothing” (192). Important turning points along the way include a pastor’s sermon on Ecclesiastes, introducing Kreeft to the adventure of philosophy, another preacher’s recommendation of Lewis, Kreeft’s own college chapel speech on “Saint” Socrates, a course on church history, a term paper on The Abolition of Man, a trip to Calvin’s campus library to see exactly what Aquinas said on nature and grace, and a mind-expanding visit to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. He says he became a Thomist before he became a Catholic.

Evangelicals of a certain generation will appreciate Kreeft’s affection for the King James Version and his warm memories of the eccentric figures who once graced the halls of small Protestant colleges. Those raised in megachurches with praise bands and no hymnals will find his former Protestant subculture virtually unrecognizable. Strangely absent from his self-portrait are references to Billy Graham, Christianity Today, and the phenomena called fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism. More importantly, the twentieth-century revival of Reformed thought, illustrated in Karl Barth’s massive achievement and the scholarly rediscovery of Jonathan Edwards, is ignored. For all his respect for the embodied human person, Kreeft seems to have no interest in the experiences of the historical Luther and Calvin. He gives no indication of having worked through the Institutes.

Kreeft the “completed Evangelical” (76) drafts his signature style into this uncharacteristic commitment to things first-person. At times his wit, his brisk prose, and his penchant for lists and hyperbole fit awkwardly into the framework of a spiritual quest. From Calvinist to Catholic never approaches the soul-searching found in Bede Griffiths’s The Golden String and Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain or the pathos of Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness and Raïssa Maritain’s We Have Been Friends Together. Often the horizon of the text is surprisingly narrow. Kreeft was a graduate student and junior professor in the early 1960s, which he describes as “neither the best of times nor the worst of times” (169), but he never mentions Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil Rights movement, or the assassination of the nation’s first Catholic president. Out of nearly two hundred pages, he devotes a single — and misleading — sentence to the Second Vatican Council: “Vatican II turned the altar and the language around” (168).

Perhaps William James’s famous “sick soul” is better equipped for the challenge of spiritual autobiography, which entails reckoning with both the anguish of deconversion and the risk of conversion. Despite his credentials as a convert, Kreeft may simply be too “healthy minded,” in James’s terms, for the “suffocatingly subjective” genre. No existential crisis, no sense of loss and gain, drives this apologia.

Whether or not the truth gets told appropriately slant in From Calvinist to Catholic, the straight-up truth communicated in the volume is tremendously important. Any Catholic thinker who thanks Calvin from the bottom of his heart and finds Aquinas “deeply Protestant . . . as well as totally Catholic” (145) has a story worth telling and a vocation worth living. Clergy and students at all levels, evangelical and Catholic, will profit from Kreeft’s testimony.

Peter A. Huff is Chief Mission Officer and Professor of Theology at Benedictine University. He is the author of five books, including The Voice of Vatican II.

Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States – David J. Endres, ed.

Endres, David J., ed. Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2023. 292 pages.

Reviewed by Aaron Martin.

On August 13, 1985, Pope St. John Paul II spoke to a group of academics in Cameroon and apologized for white Christians who did not live up to the call to help their neighbor: “We ask pardon from our African brothers who suffered so much because of the trade in blacks.” Later, in the Jubilee Year of 2000, John Paul II again asked forgiveness for episodes in the Church’s history when its members failed to live up to the Gospel’s demands, including slavery. We in the Church have always been held to a certain standard, as John Paul II said in 1985: “The Gospel remains a call without equivocation.”

If the Gospel is the standard by which we judge actions and institutions, slavery seems clearly wrong. Yet throughout the country’s history, Catholic bishops and laity alike did not have a unified position on the issue. There were many competing values: bishops in Southern dioceses argued for slavery to continue because it benefitted their parishioners. Irish immigrants in the North argued against emancipation for fear that freed Blacks would compete for their jobs. In the face of a papal letter from Pope Benedict XV on the evils of the African slave trade, everyone seemed to equivocate and argue that the pope must have been talking about only the cross-Atlantic trade of slaves and not the institution of slavery as it then existed in the U.S.

The historian Francisco Cervantes once wrote that “the role of the historian is to attempt to understand the past, as far as is possible, on its own terms” and suggested that, as we look back on history, we “show sympathy and understanding for belief and convictions that now seem discredited to us.” That hermeneutic is an important one to use while reading the essays in Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States. Our history is full of fallible people: religious orders that owned slaves, individual bishops who argued in favor of slavery, immigrants who argued against freeing the slaves because they were afraid of economic competition, and even some who believed that Blacks were inferior by nature.

The institution of the Church exists in specific times and places, and the different social, political, and moral understandings of a time can greatly influence how Catholics understand the Church’s role in society, and can even shape how people understand and apply the Church’s moral teaching. St. Paul did not denounce slavery. Jesus did not explicitly do so either. But in nineteenth-century America, the debate was lively.

The discussion started, in significant part, because Pope Gregory XVI issued a bull denouncing the slave trade in 1815. Slave-state bishops demurred and claimed that the pope was only talking about the slave trade elsewhere, not slavery as a general institution. Those from free states, like Archbishop John Purcell of Cincinnati, condemned slavery more broadly and rejoiced to be living in a state that did not support that institution. Bishops responding to the bull tried to justify their own position based on the prevailing ethos in their own particular dioceses rather than presenting a unified moral position.

Among the Catholic laity, even in the North, there was a widespread belief that slavery was a necessary evil — or that we should not push too much for abolition or emancipation. In the years leading up to the Civil War, “not a single Catholic editor was unequivocally antislavery.” In fact, “they depicted abolitionists as anti-Catholic bigots and warned that abolition would have terribly disruptive consequences.” (123) In Boston, editors of the Pilot opposed emancipation in no uncertain terms: “‘The truth is no government suits the Negroes of the South, but the domestic government they have,’ that is, slavery.” (163)

The bishops were similarly divided. Bishop John England from Charleston wrote a lengthy defense of slavery as an institution, citing biblical and patristic sources to support his position. According to one commentator, he “sought ‘to exhibit the perfect compatibility of the Domestic Slavery, as it now exists in our southern states, with the principles and practices of the Christian religion.’” (105) A northern bishop, John Hughes, the Archbishop of New York, stated that slavery “was an institution as old as man, which, in the African’s case has been a civilizing experience for the race.” (162) Despite this support for the institution of slavery among bishops in the North and South, other bishops spoke out strongly against it. Archbishop John Purcell of Cincinnati — on the literal border of North and South — was the first to speak clearly, publicly, and frequently against slavery. John Martin Henni, the bishop of Milwaukee, connected the success of the North in the Civil War to the slavery debate. He said that a Union victory “was vital ‘not only to prevent the extension, but to put an end to the existence of the great and crying shame upon all Christendom, the peculiar institution of the South.’” (167–68)

Change the topic, and these debates could be going on in the Church today. They are the same arguments, played in a different key. And the essays in this volume should cause us to reflect: How much are we, like the bishops and laity of the mid-nineteenth century, influenced by the society around us — politically, sociologically, technologically, and in just about every other way? Are our political views informed more by the party to which we belong or the Gospel? Do we voice opposition to whatever may run contrary to Church teaching, regardless of its source?

If there is one criticism, it is that that all but two of the essays were previously published elsewhere—sometimes more than 20 years ago. For the two new essays, one is a niche essay solely on the method of tracing sacramental records for slaves. The other is a general overview by the capable editor, Fr. David Endres, which is definitely worth reading. But it would also be nice to see scholars take up this research anew and contribute more to the discussion.

Having all of these discussions in one volume is very helpful, especially to someone who would likely not find and read each essay individually. As a primer on the topic, it should prove to be a useful resource for anyone seeking to get acquainted with the issue.

Aaron Martin, JD, PhL, and his wife live in Phoenix, AZ with their four children. Aaron owns his own law practice and is the Chair of the Diocese of Phoenix’s Ethics in Ministry Board. He is also a member and the Vice Chair of the USCCB’s National Review Board. He writes regularly at martinlawandmediation.substack.com.

A Thousand Pounds – Brianne Edwards

Edwards, Brianne. A Thousand Pounds: Finding the Strength to Live and Love Under the Weight of Unbearable Loss. Stamford, CT: Catholic Psych Press, 2022. 211 pages.

Reviewed by Fr. Anthony Lusvardi, S.J.

A Thousand Pounds: Finding the Strength to Live and Love Under the Weight of Unbearable Loss is a profound and beautiful book, as hope-giving as it is heartbreaking. In it, Brianne Edwards, a Catholic mother of six from South Dakota’s Black Hills, tells the story of the death of her son Lachlan to sudden infant death syndrome and the long process of learning to live anew after that loss.

The first part of the book is simply an account of Lachlan’s death. It is a hard read, told with a directness that gives the reader access to what for most of us is an unimaginable experience. For those involved in pastoral ministry, such an opportunity to walk alongside Brianne and her family through the days of grief and confusion is invaluable. Alongside Brianne’s own grief we see numerous other people — relatives and friends, a few priests, funeral directors, co-workers and near strangers — come in and out of the picture, often unsure how to react, some helpful and others not. The author writes with sympathy and understanding even of those who do not quite manage to be helpful, but it is immensely valuable to see and reflect upon the different ways of being present to those experiencing such excruciating loss.

The weight of such a loss never really goes away, the book makes clear, but it can be integrated into a fully Christian life characterized by love, joy, and generosity. The second half of the book talks about how Brianne learned to grieve and to live in the years after Lachlan’s death. The author recognizes that there is no single right way to grieve and does not offer a to-do list to get over loss. Indeed, in writing, for example, about the effect of loss on marriage, she sensitively shows how a couple can experience differences in “styles” of grieving and yet grow closer through these differences. (She also points out that the claim that most marriages end in divorce after the loss of a child is not supported by the sociological data.) The book shares experience without judgment in a way that, I suspect, will be tremendously helpful to those struggling to come to terms with the loss of a loved one.

A Thousand Pounds is an extraordinarily wise book, and its greatest merit is its ability to share in an accessible way the kind of wisdom that can only be learned through struggle. Nonetheless, the book is also well-researched, with an appropriate (but not overwhelming) grounding in science, psychology, and spirituality. It is a courageous book, not only in the sense that it took courage to write, but also in the sense that its author learned to find meaning by “leaning in” to her grief, by acknowledging her love for Lachlan and the reality of her loss and also by identifying and overcoming certain obstacles that needed “pruning” — such as fear of shame, the desire to numb her feelings, and the tendency to compare suffering. Some of the book’s practical reflections provide an example of growth in virtue with a relevance beyond the experience of grief.

The presence of God and his grace is everywhere present in A Thousand Pounds, though not in a heavy-handed or always explicit way. The book does not pretend to be a theological treatise, even if its spiritual implications are profound. It is a book of practical wisdom and lived faith. The book’s final chapters recognize that learning to live after loss involves a certain amount of “wrestling with God,” as Jacob does in the book of Genesis. Yet reading A Thousand Pounds, one never has any doubt that such wrestling will bring us closer to the divine, making us stronger and more deeply loving Christians.

The book’s title refers, of course, to the weight of grief, which does not go away even as we grow to be able to bear it. But the book shows that through such painful growth we can become more fully alive with an ever-deeper longing for the eternal life with God that is the purpose of our existence. For those involved in parish ministry or anyone ministering to those who grieve, as well as for those who are themselves struggling to bear the weight of loss, A Thousand Pounds is more than worth its weight in gold.

Fr. Anthony R. Lusvardi, S.J., teaches sacramental theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He is the author of Baptism of Desire and Christian Salvation (Catholic University of America Press).

Essential Eucharistic Adoration Prayers – Marie Paul Curley, FSP

Marie Paul Curley, FSP. Essential Eucharistic Adoration Prayers. Boston, MA: Pauline Books & Media, 2024. 176 pages.

Reviewed by Lawrence Montz.

Sister Curley, FSP, describes herself as a writer and complier but she is much more, as she also provides insights which help the adorer better appreciate the deeper meanings of the diverse prayer themes she believes useful for fertile adoration. She has been a Daughter of St. Paul for nearly forty years and brings her bountiful prayer background to the fore in the collection of the Eucharistic Prayers highlighted. Sister Curley is a regular presenter on the Salt + Light Radio Hour program, as well as the author of many books.

Catholics and non-Catholics alike may consult the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part II: The Celebration of the Christian Mystery, Article 3, for a concise description of the Catholic Eucharistic belief in a readily understandable format. Catholics consider the Eucharist (the word is derived from the Greek for thanksgiving) to be the true presence of the Body and Blood of Jesus for which testimony is given in the four Gospel books. In Catholic parlance, adoration typically implies the worship of the true presence of Christ outside of the Mass.

The adoration prayers presented are geared to differing needs and dispositions, all centered on the recognition of the ultimate gift of almighty God, himself. Blessed James Alberione, founder of the Pauline family, wrote, “Holy Scripture will be our most prized reading; this letter from our heavenly Father invites us to heaven.” This sentiment is reflected in the Bible being given prominence in the current work as the source of some of the most fruitful adoration prayers because they are derived from the word of God. Thereafter the recommendations are segmented into prayer types reflective of the aspiration of the adorer. Naturally prayers of adoration that are indicative of our reverence and love of God are detailed for the worshiper before those of a more personal nature which have the varied goals of thanking and praising the Lord, pleas of repentance and reparation, petitions or supplications for His blessings, and praying with Mary.

Following the advice of St. Peter Julian Eymard of never attempting to “separate Jesus from Mary,” Sister Curley submits a collection of prayers under In Adoration with Mary, that recognizes that Jesus gave us Mary as our Mother on Calvary, the Mother that God selected to bear the Lord, and the first disciple and adorer of His Majesty. The final Marian prayer in this section is one inspired by the Pauline founder himself that implores Mary to inspire us to follow the Lord so that one day we may join Him in heaven.

The book ends with a short list of prayers used often in public Benediction (blessing) services, but which are also suitable for individual prayer. The principal ones are St. Thomas Aquinas’ O Salutaris Hostia and The Divine Praises. This short book provides a useful guide to the faithful who wish to worship the Lord, particularly in Adoration. The guide should be made available in all adoration chapels as a useful tool to help the adorers quiet down and center their focus on the Lord truly present in the tabernacle or monstrance before them.

Lawrence Montz is a Benedictine Oblate of St. Gregory Abbey in Shawnee, Oklahoma, past Serran District Governor of Dallas, and serves as his Knights of Columbus council’s Vocations Program Director. He resides in the Dallas Diocese.

The Prayer List – Jane Knuth

Knuth, Jane. The Prayer List: …and Other True Stories of How Families Pray. Chicago, IL: Loyola Press, 2018. 184 pages.

Reviewed by Lawrence Montz.

The title of this work may, at first blush, strike one as implying another simplistic or formulaic compendium of prayers. In a certain sense, a reader could consider the book “simple” as it reflects the prayer lives of ordinary people and families, but it also has profound insights gained from fruitful experiences of prayer. None of the few dozen vignettes reflects theological treatises on prayer at first glance; after all, they are just the prayer habits of Jane Doe and John Smith. These personal testimonies, however, may lead the reader to a deeper understanding of the purpose of prayer and their own relationship with the Lord. This work has been recognized by the author’s peers, not just in promotional marketing efforts of the publisher, as being worthy of reading. Accolades have been rendered by such organizations as the Illumination Book Awards, the International Book’s Awards, and the Catholic Press Association.

Jane Knuth wrote The Prayer List: …and Other True Stories of How Families Pray after years of ministry to those in need as a volunteer with the Saint Vincent DePaul Society. The desire for such service to society’s marginalized stemmed from developing a commitment to interceding for others, a family task she inherited from her beloved Aunt Kay who herself received the duty from her grandmother. Besides being a prayer warrior, Jane Knuth has authored several other books and written articles for the diocesan newspaper in Kalamazoo.

A prayer list is exactly as it suggests, but the vignettes offered cover a multitude of prayer traditions and techniques employed by regular families. These testimonies have two important characteristics in common which can aid the beseecher in their own quest to hear God’s voice. Gratitude is a key feature expressed even if the supplicant does not receive the answer they believed desired. Perseverance, as Christ advised, is also an important element to praying. Persistent imploring helps the one seeking develop trust in God’s benevolence regardless of the life situations in which they may find themselves in as believers. God can certainly accomplish miracles but must never be treated as the heavenly ATM some seekers covet.

With the central elements acknowledged, the book delves into what might be classified as “points of contact” with the divine. These are habits of prayer developed by families to preserve their connection with the Father. The author herself employs a literal list of people or intercessions her family raises up to the Lord. Additional suggestions for developing a point of regular contact with God are certain types of prayers at consistent times, such as grace before meals or prayers we may utter before rising from bed in the morning. Others utilize chants or singing to maintain that connection. That relationship might also reflect a regular prayer position, location, venerated sacred statue, or icon. We are blessed with myriads of techniques that families and individuals can use. Importantly, the writer cautions readers that their prayer list may need to be pared in order to prevent the time becoming a chore rather than a truly spiritual experience.

While we must not expect to change the immutable God, still the Lord encourages us to be persevering in prayer. To what end? God desires prayer for our benefit, not his glory. He wishes graces to flow to his people that will help them to be saved by opening them up to the needs of others in charity. Our intercessions may not seem productive, but we should recall that it is God who gives us the grace and inspiration to pray in the first place and that he appreciates our efforts even if imperfect. The Prayer List offers the reader suggestions on how to develop and maintain our relationship with God by our concern for others, sometimes with the assistance of created things and places, whatever helps us center on the Lord. God desires us to sacrifice self as Jesus did on the Cross. Praying regularly with gratitude and trusting that we are doing God’s will by using his creation to help maintain our ongoing conversation with him can help our efforts bear fruit. The Prayer List can help us develop a habit of prayer, whether by simply listing our needs and desires on a regular basis or a composition of place such as kneeling on our prie-dieu like an observant Carthusian monk in his cell.

Lawrence Montz is a Benedictine Oblate of St. Gregory Abbey in Shawnee, Oklahoma, past Serran District Governor of Dallas, and serves as his Knights of Columbus council’s Vocations Program Director. He resides in the Dallas Diocese.