Weddingbee boards

What are some of your favorite books that have to do with religion, Christianity, and/or Catholicism? I read a ton of books in this genre when I was going through RCIA. What are some of your favorites and why?

Two of my favorites were Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis (of Chronicles of Narnia fame). For anyone interested who has not read them, they are not about Catholicism in particular but about Christianity in general (Lewis was actually a convert to the Church of England, but that church in his day bears much resemblance to the Catholic church today). Mere Christianity was really powerful in reasoning the "why could there be a God" argument.

The Screwtape Letters are a satire, wherein a minor demon has the task to corrupt a newly Christian man and the conceit is that he is writing home to his uncle who is a more powerful demon, who gives him advice in reply. They're hysterically funny and very poignant. They appealed to me because whenever I am reading one argument, I like to play devil's advocate...except in this case, I found myself arguing the affirmative!

If you've never read them, here is an excerpt I find quite compelling, especially when I find myself losing steam in the religion department (this excerpt is publically available on the internet):

"Another possibility is that of direct attack on his faith. When you have caused him to assume that the trough is permanent, can you not persuade him that "his religious phase" is just going to die away like all his previous phases? Of course there is no conceivable way of getting by reason from the proposition "I am losing interest in this" to the proposition "This is false". But, as I said before, it is jargon, not reason, you must rely on. The mere word phase will very likely do the trick. I assume that the creature has been through several of them before—they all have—and that he always feels superior and patronising to the ones he has emerged from, not because he has really criticised them but simply because they are in the past. (You keep him well fed on hazy ideas of Progress and Development and the Historical Point of View, I trust, and give him lots of modern Biographies to read? The people in them are always emerging from Phases, aren't they?)

You see the idea? Keep his mind off the plain antithesis between True and False. Nice shadowy expressions—"It was a phase"—"I've been through all that"—and don't forget the blessed word 'Adolescent.'"