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 dynamics 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 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.
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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.
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​Read Rebecca's articles at the National Catholic Reporter, The Christian Century, Messy Jesus Business, Commonweal, and America.​
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