Fr. Brown's 2025 Reading List

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave

This is a special Bicentennial Edition of Douglass's most famous book which has been published by his direct descendants through Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives (FDFI). It contains a never-before publicized pencil drawing of Douglass on the cover which was created by his grandson, Joseph Douglass. Joseph is the grandfather of Nettie Washington Douglass who serves as Chairwoman for FDFI. Inside this edition, Nettie narrates a family photograph section which illustrates her direct connection to both Douglass and another American icon, Booker T. Washington (she is Douglass's great-great granddaughter and Washington's great granddaughter). The Forward of this edition is written by Kenneth B. Morris, Jr., Nettie's eldest son, who describes in more detail his historical kinship to the Douglass and Washington legacies. Bryan Stevenson, author of the New York Times best-seller, Just Mercy, writes a brilliant Introduction to this Bicentennial Edition. In his piece, Stevenson connects the challenges faced by Douglass with the most problematic social injustices of our time such as mass incarceration, racial inequality, and police violence. Every ebook that is sold will help the Douglass family print and give away hardcover copies of this edition to young people as part of their One Million Abolitionists project. The Library of Congress named Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass one of the 88 Books That Shaped America. Published in 1845, his first autobiography became an instant bestseller putting his life in danger since he had escaped slavery just seven years earlier. The Narrative helped change the course of the U.S. Abolitionist Movement in the mid-nineteenth century and has been changing the lives of readers ever since.

Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times

In a world increasingly marked by division and discord, beloved Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle offers a transformative vision of community and compassion—a perfect message for readers of Anne Lamott, Mary Oliver, and Richard Rohr.

Over the past thirty years, Gregory Boyle has transformed tens of thousands of lives through his work as the founder of Homeboy Industries, the largest gang-intervention program in the world. The program runs on two unwavering principles: 1) We are all inherently good (no exceptions), and 2) we belong to each other (no exceptions). Boyle believes that these two ideas allow all of us to cultivate a new way of seeing the world. Rather than the tribalism that excludes and punishes, this new narrative proposes a village that cherishes. Pooka, a former gang member, puts it plainly: “Here, love is our lens. It is how we see things.”

In Cherished Belonging, Boyle calls back to Christianity’s origins as a spiritual movement of equality, emancipation, and peace. Early Christianity was a way of life—not a set of beliefs. Boyle’s vision of community is a space for people to join together and heal one another in a new collective living, a world dedicated to kindness as a constant and radical act of defiance. As one homie, Marcus, told a classroom filled with inner-city teenagers, “If love was a place, it would be Homeboy.”

Cherished Belonging invites us to nurture the connections that are all around us and live with kindness. Boyle believes that “the answer to every question is, indeed, compassion.” Through colorful and profound stories brimming with wisdom, humor, and inspiration, we understand that love is the light inside everything.

Dear Dante: Poems

An imagined conversation with Dante Alighieri written in response to the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death by fellow Catholic poet, lover and master of the sonnet, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell.

In the summer of 2021, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell honored the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, by embarking on a three-month pilgrimage through the 100 cantos of The Divine Comedy, reading one canto per day. This new collection, Dear Dante, is her response to Dante's epic poem: 39 poems (13 for each of the 3 canticles), plus an additional 3 to serve as prologue and epilogue, all written in the poetic forms Dante loved best: the sonnet and the form he invented, terza rima.

In O’Donnell’s words: “Dear Dante is a species of accompaniment, an act of homage, and a long love letter to Dante. It might also be read as a series of meditations that attest to how dear Dante is to us. The Commedia is our inheritance, a gift granted to readers by our brother poet 700 years ago. These poems are an admittedly small expression of gratitude for that grand and graced gift. Grazie Mille, Maestro.”

Embracing Hope: On Freedom, Responsibility & the Meaning of Life

The Library of Congress lists Man’s Search for Meaning as one of the ten most influential books in history. Scientists and artists, politicians and celebrities regularly cite Frankl as one of the most important authors every person should read. Now, there is another book for his devoted fans to add to their collections.

Published here for the first time in the United States, Embracing Hope continues Frankl’s enduring life’s work and provides even more lessons for those searching for meaning and purpose. It’s made up of four distinct pieces from Frankl on different themes - all uniting around the idea that we should remain open to life even when we have been subjected to appalling injustice, and even when we are faced with our own mortality and the brief nature of our lives. At a time of global suffering where so many are searching for hope and meaning, Frankl’s work seems more relevant and more important than ever. Whether you're a devoted follower of Frankl's work or a newcomer seeking to enrich your understanding of life's purpose, this book promises a captivating journey that will leave you pondering its teachings long after you've turned the final page.

Just imagine what would happen, what life would look like, if there were no death. Imagine what it would be like if you could postpone anything and everything, if you could put it off for eternity. You wouldn't have to do anything today or tomorrow. Everything could just as easily be done next week, next month, next year, in a decade, in 100 or 1,000 years. Only in the face of death, only under pressure from the finiteness, the temporal limitation of human existence, is there any point in going about our business, and not only in going about our business, but in experiencing life, and not only in experiencing life but also in loving someone, and even in enduring and surviving something that is inflicted on us.

Hope: The Autobiography

Hope is the first autobiography in history ever to be published by a Pope. Written over six years, this complete autobiography starts in the early years of the twentieth century, with Pope Francis’s Italian roots and his ancestors’ courageous migration to Latin America, continuing through his childhood, the enthusiasms and preoccupations of his youth, his vocation, adult life, and the whole of his papacy up to the present day.

In recounting his memories with intimate narrative force (not forgetting his own personal passions), Pope Francis deals unsparingly with some of the crucial moments of his papacy and writes candidly, fearlessly, and prophetically about some of the most important and controversial questions of our present times: war and peace (including the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East), migration, environmental crisis, social policy, the position of women, sexuality, technological developments, the future of the Church and of religion in general.

Hope includes a wealth of revelations, anecdotes, and illuminating thoughts. It is a thrilling and very human memoir, moving and sometimes funny, which represents the “story of a life” and, at the same time, a touching moral and spiritual testament that will fascinate readers throughout the world and will be Pope Francis’s legacy of hope for future generations. The book is enhanced by remarkable photographs, including private and unpublished material made personally available by Pope Francis himself.

Reading Genesis

For generations, the book of Genesis has been treated by scholars as a collection of documents by various hands, expressing different factional interests, with borrowings from other ancient literatures that mark the text as derivative. In other words, academic interpretation of Genesis has centered on the question of its basic coherency, just as fundamentalist interpretation has centered on the question of the appropriateness of reading it as literally true.

Both of these approaches preclude an appreciation of its greatness as literature, its rich articulation and exploration of themes that resonate through the whole of Scripture. Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis, which includes the full text of the King James Version of the book, is a powerful consideration of the profound meanings and promise of God’s enduring covenant with humanity. This magisterial book radiates gratitude for the constancy and benevolence of God’s abiding faith in Creation.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.