Rebecca Bratten Weiss
Rebecca Bratten Weiss is a writer, editor, and scholar who studies the intersection of religion and culture, with an emphasis on the mechanisms of far-right ideology. She is digital editor at U.S. Catholic magazine, co-host of the Glad You Asked podcast, and a regular contributor to the National Catholic Reporter. She is the author of The Books That Made Us: Deconstructing the Modern Christian Classics (Orbis Books). Along with Jessica Mesman, she co-edited Sick Pilgrims: An Anthology of Catholic Spiritual Autobiography.
As well as writing on religion, politics, culture, and gender for multiple popular venues, she is a poet who has published in various literary journals, and in three chapbooks.
​
Rebecca holds degrees in philosophy and English literature, and taught university courses in both fields for over ten years.
The Books That Made Us: Deconstructing the Modern Christian Classics (Orbis Books, 2025) is now available.
​
What do you do when you realize that the books you were taught to revere set you up with problematic perspectives on human nature, morality, and social order? This is the question Bratten Weiss explores as she revisits beloved but problematic canonical Christian writers like G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Flannery O'Connor.
As Bratten Weiss discovers, leaving behind ultra-conservative Christian ideology is never as simple as just walking out a door. It involves a journey of self-understanding and the need to sort through, as she puts it, “the rubble of my old beliefs, trying to decide what’s worth keeping.” And this involves reevaluating the art and stories that shaped our self-understanding.
Besides reevaluating formerly beloved classics, the author offers vignettes of her childhood in a family of bookish Christian survivalists, her embrace of far-right Catholicism at an ultra-conservative university, and the painful process of extricating herself from false ideologies.
The Books That Made Us reminds readers how powerfully literature can shape us—and how devastatingly it can harm us.
The Books That Made Us can be purchased from the Orbis website or from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, or Cokesbury.
​
​​
​Read Rebecca's articles at the National Catholic Reporter, The Christian Century, Messy Jesus Business, Commonweal, and America.​
​
​
Do we love machines more than one another?
October 29, 2025.
Across the plateaus, south of the county seat, a monster power shovel the height of a 20-story building loomed on the horizon. Its name was the Silver Spade, and it was one of several giant shovels used for strip mining in my region in the latter half of the 20th century. As a kid I always got a thrill when we drove that way and I saw it in the distance.
​
All the monster shovels had names: the Mountaineer, Big Brutus, the GEM of Egypt, the Captain. Biggest of all was Big Muskie the dragline excavator, the largest single-bucket digging machine ever made. Its scoop was big enough to hold a house.
Read more at U.S. Catholic
Faith at the expense of freedom
Catholic integralism is not fascism. But the two have often made common cause.
October 2024
​​
In Canto 19 of Inferno, Dante depicts the damned souls of the simoniacs—those who enriched themselves by selling sacred things—imprisoned head-down in circular holes in the rock, feet on fire. Dante despised corrupt clergy and was especially severe about sins relating to greed, so it’s no surprise that he consigned quite a few medieval popes to this section of hell.
​
But for Dante, simony wasn’t just about greed. It was associated with the decadence of a church that had amassed too much temporal power—a theme that runs through the whole Divine Comedy. It’s why the poet inveighs against the emperor Constantine, whose conversion brought the church wealth and imperial jurisdiction. Elsewhere, Dante argues that church and empire should be distinct spheres, neither wielding power over the other, each answering directly to God.
Read more at The Christian Century
Reading The Waste Land as it turns 100
December 2022
​
In 2018, my sister and I visited the parish church of St. Michael and All Angels’ in the English village of East Coker, where poet T. S. Eliot is buried. Although born in the United States, Eliot lived in England for much of his life, and his burial in the Somerset hamlet, where his ancestors had once lived, was in keeping with the convictions of a man for whom tradition was eminently important. . .
​
Read more at The Christian Century
​
​
When localism becomes nationalism
August 25, 2021
​
Celebrity farmer Joel Salatin, known to many from Michael Pollan’s best-selling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, was one of the most influential figures in the local food movement. So it was a blow to many of his fans when his history of appallingly racist remarks and bigotry toward people of color became public knowledge. After an ongoing social media dispute, Mother Earth News, the go-to publication for devotees of the local and sustainable, cut all ties with Salatin in 2020.
To me, the revelation of Salatin’s bigotry was not surprising. . .
​
Social justice Catholics should reclaim rhetoric of objective truth, goodness
​June 8, 2021
​
When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, soon to be elected Pope Benedict XVI, memorably warned of a looming "dictatorship of relativism" in 2005, he articulated what many conservative Catholics had long believed: that objective truth was under attack by secular powers. This view was mainstream at the university where I studied philosophy. For a while, I even embraced it myself. . .
Support of Trump within church has driven some Catholics to the exits
​April 29, 2021
​
The day after Donald Trump won the presidential election, Mike Boyle decided he was ready to become an Episcopalian.
​
A practicing Catholic all his life, Boyle was serious enough about his faith that he had spent three years as a member of a Dominican community, in the priestly formation track. But even prior to 2016, he was growing frustrated with the behavior of lay Catholics and clergy. . .
​Read more at the National Catholic Reporter​​​