Simon Yarrow's Book Recommendations (Updated for 2021)

Want to know what books Simon Yarrow recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Simon Yarrow's favorite book recommendations of all time.

Between Heaven and Earth

The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them

Robert A. Orsi | 4.43

Between Heaven and Earth explores the relationships men, women, and children have formed with the Virgin Mary and the saints in twentieth-century American Catholic history, and reflects, more broadly, on how people live in the company of sacred figures and how these relationships shape the ties between people on earth. In this boldly argued and beautifully written book, Robert Orsi also considers how scholars of religion occupy the ground in between belief and analysis, faith and scholarship.

Orsi infuses his analysis with an autobiographical voice steeped in his own Italian-American...

Recommended by Simon Yarrow, and 1 others.

Simon YarrowHe is both observer of and participant in mid-20th century American Catholicism. (Source)

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Mohawk Saint

Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits

Allan Greer | 3.73

On October 21, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI canonized Saint Kateri Tekakwitha as the first Native North American saint. Mohawk Saint is a work of history that situates her remarkable life in its seventeenth century setting, a time of wars, epidemics, and cultural transformations for the Indian peoples of the northeast. The daughter of a Algonquin mother and an Iroquois father, Catherine/Saint Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680) has become known over the centuries as a Catholic convert so holy that, almost immediately upon her death, she became the object of a cult. Today she is revered as a patron saint by Native Americans and the patroness of ecology and the environment by Catholics more generally, the first Native North American proposed for sainthood.

Tekakwitha was born at a time of cataclysmic change, as Native Americans of the northeast experienced the effects of European contact and colonization. A convert to Catholicism in the 1670s, she embarked on a physically and mentally grueling program of self-denial, aiming to capture the spiritual power of the newcomers from across the sea. Her story intersects with that of Claude Chauchetiere, a French Jesuit of mystical tendencies who came to America hoping to rescue savages from sin and paganism. But it was Claude himself who needed help to face down his own despair. He became convinced that Tekakwitha was a genuine saint and that conviction gave meaning to his life. Though she lived until just 24, Tekakwitha's severe penances and vivid visions were so pronounced that Chauchetiere wrote an elegiac hagiography shortly after her death.

With this richly crafted study, Allan Greer has written a dual biography of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha and Chauchetiere, unpacking their cultures in Native America and in France. He examines the missionary and conversion activities of the Jesuits in Canada, and explains the Indian religious practices that interweave with converts' Catholic practices. He also relates how Tekakwitha's legend spread through the hagiographies and to areas of the United States, Canada, Europe, and Mexico in the centuries since her death. The book also explores issues of body and soul, illness and healing, sexuality and celibacy, as revealed in the lives of a man and a woman, from profoundly different worlds, who met centuries ago in the remote Mohawk village of Kahnawake.
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Recommended by Simon Yarrow, and 1 others.

Simon YarrowIt’s a short book and a real page-turner. (Source)

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Mother of God

A History of the Virgin Mary

Miri Rubin | 4.10

A sweeping, ambitious study of the Virgin Mary’s emergence and role throughout Western history

How did the Virgin Mary, about whom very little is said in the Gospels, become one of the most powerful and complex religious figures in the world? To arrive at the answers to this far-reaching question, one of our foremost medieval historians, Miri Rubin, investigates the ideas, practices, and images that have developed around the figure of Mary from the earliest decades of Christianity to around the year 1600. Drawing on an extraordinarily wide range of sources—including music,... more

Recommended by Simon Yarrow, and 1 others.

Simon YarrowMary is, in many ways, a headache for the church and for theologians. (Source)

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The Cult of the Saints

Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, Enlarged Edition

Peter Brown | 4.24

In this groundbreaking work, Peter Brown explores how the worship of saints and their corporeal remains became central to religious life in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. During this period, earthly remnants served as a heavenly connection, and their veneration is a fascinating window into the cultural mood of a region in transition.

Brown challenges the long-held “two-tier” idea of religion that separated the religious practices of the sophisticated elites from those of the superstitious masses, instead arguing that the cult of the saints crossed boundaries... more

Recommended by Simon Yarrow, and 1 others.

Simon YarrowThe book…is still revolutionary in the way that it offered us a functionalist account of what’s going on with the cult of saints. (Source)

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Confessions

Saint Augustine and Henry Chadwic | 4.21

Augustine's Confessions is one of the most influential and most innovative works of Latin literature. Written in the author's early forties in the last years of the fourth century A.D. and during his first years as a bishop, they reflect on his life and on the activity of remembering and interpreting a life. Books I-IV are concerned with infancy and learning to talk, schooldays, sexual desire and adolescent rebellion, intense friendships and intellectual exploration. Augustine evolves and analyses his past with all the resources of the reading which shaped his mind: Virgil and Cicero,... more

Recommended by Susan Jacoby, Carlos Eire, Richard Harries, and 6 others.

Susan JacobyThe Confessions is a book that everybody should read. It is seminal, if you can excuse the expression. (Source)

Carlos EireSt Augustine of Hippo was one of the first thinkers to struggle with the concepts of time, memory and eternity. (Source)

Richard HarriesHe was a wonderful, wonderful writer and a deeply passionate man. He was very sensual. (Source)

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Simon Yarrow's Top Book Recommendations

Between Heaven and Earth

Mohawk Saint

Mother of God

The Cult of the Saints

Confessions

Don't have time to read Simon Yarrow's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.