Rebecca Bratten Weiss
Writer and editor
Rebecca Bratten Weiss's new book The Books That Made Us: Deconstructing the Modern Christian Classics is forthcoming from Orbis Books in 2025.
Rebecca is an award-winning journalist and digital editor at U.S. Catholic Magazine. She has published extensively on religion, culture, and politics, and is a regular contributor at the National Catholic Reporter. Her byline has appeared in The Tablet, Image Journal, Plough, Commonweal, The Christian Century, and America Magazine, among others. Her writing can also be found on Patheos and on the Messy Jesus Business blog. She freelances as a reporter in the Appalachian Ohio community where she resides and also offers freelance editing services for authors of books, essays, and creative work.
Rebecca's poetry and creative pieces have appeared in Channel, Poetry South, New Ohio Review, Presence, Two Hawks Quarterly, Shooter, Westerly, Sandy River Review, and Convivium Journal. She also has three poetry chapbook collections: The Gods We Have Eaten (2023), Talking to Snakes (2020), and Mud Woman, a collaboration with Joanna Penn Cooper (2018).
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Along with Jessica Mesman, Rebecca edited and contributed to the collection Sick Pilgrims: An anthology of Catholic Spiritual Autobiography (2022). She also contributed to the collection The Human Soul: Essays in Honor of Nalin Ranasinghe (2021).
Rebecca holds degrees in philosophy and English literature, and taught university courses in both fields for over ten years. Through Convivium School and Muse Writing Collective she has led online courses and tutorials in literature and creative writing. She is co-host of U.S. Catholic's popular Glad You Asked podcast and has appeared as a guest on the Straight White American Jesus podcast.
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Francis: The pope who left a fingerprint on pop culture
May 3, 2025
Pope Francis was, in some ways, the antidote to an image-obsessed media scene. He lived and dressed simply, refusing to judge others according to their appearance and denounced our capitalistic "throwaway culture" that sends mountains of fast fashion to landfills. Yet Francis’ papacy unfolded in an era of extreme visibility, so simple actions like taking the bus instead of a limousine or embracing a disfigured man became viral clickbait. The culture’s fascination with Francis’ papacy indicated a hunger for the simplicity and humility he projected. It was an antidote we craved. . .
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Reading The Waste Land as it turns 100
December 2022
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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. . .
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Read more at The Christian Century
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When localism becomes nationalism
August 25, 2021
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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. . .
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Social justice Catholics should reclaim rhetoric of objective truth, goodness
​June 8, 2021
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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
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The day after Donald Trump won the presidential election, Mike Boyle decided he was ready to become an Episcopalian.
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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​​​