Rebecca Bratten Weiss
Rebecca Bratten Weiss 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 has published extensively on religion, culture, and politics, and in multiple literary journals, and is also the author of three poetry chapbooks. Along with Jessica Mesman, she co-edited Sick Pilgrims: An Anthology of Catholic Spiritual Autobiography.
Rebecca holds degrees in philosophy and English literature, and taught university courses in both fields for over ten years.
Rebecca Bratten Weiss's new book The Books That Made Us: Deconstructing the Modern Christian Classics is forthcoming from Orbis Books in 2025.
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 an ultra-conservative Christian upbringing 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 intriguing glimpses of her own bookish childhood raised by counter-cultural utopians in an unheated farmhouse, her adolescence spent riding horses and declaiming poetry, her embrace of far-right Christianity, and the painful process of extricating herself from it.
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 will be available to order from the Orbis website on October 29. Or you can pre-order it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, or Cokesbury.
Read Rebecca's articles at the National Catholic Reporter, The Christian Century, Messy Jesus Business, Commonweal, and America.
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. . .
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. . .