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In this episode Trent honestly breaks down every book he’s written from “the worst” to “the GOAT” and everything in between.
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Transcription:
In today’s episode I’m going to honestly rank every book I’ve ever written with the classic tier ranking of s-tier being the superior, A-tier, being great, b tier good, c-tier, okay with some flaws, d-tier meaning a lot of flaws, and f-tier being the worst.
And especially when it comes to the not-so-great books I’ll recommend some better ones in their place along with just other good books on general on the topics I’ve addressed.
So, let’s get started in order of my book’s publication:
Number 1, 2013’s Answering Atheism.
F-tier. It’s the worst book on the whole list. It’s not a bad book. It’s just my first book so I made a lot of style and structure mistakes as a new author. I’m also placing this as F-tier because I’ve done a lot of work on the philosophy of religion since I published that book 12 years ago and I’ve changed my mind on things like the kalam cosmological argument and the moral argument, as can be seen in my debates dialogues and podcast episodes.
Eventually I want to write a whole new book on atheism, but until then, if you want a really good book on atheism get Ed Feser’s Five Proofs for the Existence of God, Josh Rasmussen’s How Reason leads to God, Brian Davies book on Philosophy of Religion, and One Less God than You, by John DeRosa which is published by Catholic Answers Press.
Number 2, 2014’s Persuasive Pro-life.
D tier. A lot of the writing drags and the layout is confusing because my editor wanted me to address different types of people rather than different kinds of pro-choice arguments. But I’m really glad I wrote it because I’m grateful I could share my decade of experience in pro-life apologetics with people who are passionate about defending the unborn.
And in 2022 I totally reworked the book Bionic man style.
I made 2nd edition shorter while adding new content, so now the book is exactly what I want it to be and I love whenever I can give it away for free at pro-life conferences to equip people to help end abortion. So the 2nd edition goes in the A-tier category.
And if you want other really great books on defending the pro-life worldview get Chris Kaczor’s Ethics of Abortion and Ryan Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis’s book Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.
Number 3, 2016’s Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties.
B tier. There are lots of Bible Difficulty encyclopedias, but they’re all written by Protestants and sometimes their theology comes through like when they answer the “Hard Saying” of Jesus saying “Eat my flesh” by saying Jesus was being metaphorical.
I’m glad I spent a year and a half to write a book to help Catholics better engage difficulties in scripture but I’ve learned a lot since writing this book ten years ago so maybe in a 2nd edition I can bring it up to A-tier status. Until then, I recommend the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, which wasn’t completely available when I wrote Hard Sayings, as a solid tool in your biblical apologetics toolbox.
Number 4, 2017’s: Why We’re Catholic.
Not just S-Tier but GOAT. My favorite book I’ve ever written because God was so gracious in using this book to help so many people. It’s sold over 500,000 copies and I’ve heard so many people tell me that after reading it they immediately signed up for OCIA and have seen other people mention it a lot online.
The main reason I wrote this book was because there wasn’t a single book you could give anyone to explain why they should be Catholic. The closest we had was Rome Sweet Home by Scott Hahn which is an awesome book but speaks more to educated Protestants since Hahn was a Protestant minister.
I wanted something you could give to atheists, non-Christians, and fallen-away Catholics of all stripes so I worked really hard to make the book accessible to people. In fact, I read each chapter aloud to my wife to make sure it was easily digestible and it’s the most common book I send people when I see someone online saying, “I’m thinking about becoming Catholic.”
Check out the link below if you want to buy a case of them at a bulk discount to keep in your car, home, and office and give out to anyone you meet.
Number 5, also published in 2017: The Case for Catholicism
S-tier. I’m so happy got the chance to write a thick, mid-level apologetic for Catholicism. It’s not basic level like Why We’re Catholic but it’s not super academic and off-putting. Instead, it’s ideal for someone with a college education and is the most common book I’ve written that’s helped pastors become Catholic. Often when I hear someone is thinking of becoming Catholic I’ll send this book along with Why We’re Catholic in case the person is inclined to go deeper in their investigation. Given space limitations the book doesn’t cover the fundamentals of the faith so, in the future, I would love to write a companion book at the same level of rigor called The Case for Christianity.
I may also do a second edition of this book or a follow up book that addresses Protestant apologetics that came out after the book was published like Walls and Collins books Roman but not Catholic and Gavin Ortlund’s What It Means to be Protestant, but for now The Case for Catholicism still stands on its own quite well.
But if your investigating Catholicism I recommend not stopping at this book. I’d recommend Thomas Joseph White’s Book The Light of Christ if you’d like a theological introduction to Catholicism that is focused on explaining what Catholicism teaches more than making arguments for the truth of Catholicism.
Number 6, 2018’s: What the Saints Never Said
C tier. It’s a fun little book and I guess after writing some heavy books in the previous years I wanted to do something light so I wrote this book on fake saint quotes. It was really fun to research but at the end of the day while it’s interesting for trivia it’s not central to my mission of evangelizing and encouraging people to be Catholic, so I’m going to put it lower on the tier list. I have toyed with the idea of writing a book called What the Saints Never Did and ruining everyone’s favorite saint traditions, but there’s no need to spend time on that when the harvest is plentiful to share the Gospel and the laborers are few.
Number 7, Also published in 2018, Made this Way co-authored with Leila Miller
B tier. Leila and I have known each other for almost twenty years. She is a Catholic mother, grandmother, online advocate for the Faith and a real spitfire. So, we had great synergy when writing this book because she would give me raw passionate dough of Catholic motherly advice on teaching kids of all ages why Catholic moral teaching makes and I would pepper the dough with footnotes, my own experience debating non-Catholics on these issues, and mold it all into a frame work to help everything flow together.
It’s a good book but my only critique of it is that it has a limited audience. It is written for parents to explain moral issues to children but we found that teens and young adults also found the book really helpful for themselves, so it makes me want to write a book that is just a defense of Catholic morality in general written at the level of Why We’re Catholic.
Number 8, 2019’s Counterfeit Christs: Finding the Real Jesus Among the Impostors
I’m putting this in C-tier. In this book I presented apologetics focused on the person of Christ where I show how atheistic Jewish, Muslim, modern, and some Protestant depictions of Jesus Christ are in error.
In reminds me of an apologetic charcuterie board where you can pick and choose little bites of knowledge that most interest you, but the book kind of bums me out because many of the topics could have been expanded into entire books so each topic will always feel insufficiently addressed. However, it’s a solid introduction to how people distort the person of Christ and I love the book’s cover.
In the future I’d like to contribute my own defense of the Christ’s divine status, especially his resurrection from the dead, but in a way a lot of apologists haven’t attempted before. Stat tuned for that. In the meantime if you want really solid defenses of Christ’s resurrection, I recommend Justin bass’s the Bed Rock of Christianity and Andrew Loke’s Investigating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ: A New Transdisciplinary Approach.
Number 9, 2020’s Can a Catholic be a Socialist, co-authored with Catherine Pakaluk
B-tier. Economics and history are hobbies of mine, so it was really fun to work with Catholic economist and CUA professor Catherine Pakaluk to engage Catholic defenses of socialism that were all the rage at the end of the 2010’s. I especially enjoyed unearthing the gruesome details of the Soviet and Chinese socialist regimes that many people have never heard about, like how Chinese socialism led to the world’s worst famine killing tens of millions of people with survivors being reduced to propping up their dead relatives in bed and pretending they were alive to collect rations from the government.
My only concern about the book is that it’s a bit short and there are many other arguments we could have addressed, like the late 19th century arguments about the relationship between capital, labor and profit that still persist to this day as well as other modern arguments for democratic socialism expressed by people like Richard Wolff. Hopefully in a few years we can release a second edition that addresses those arguments and incorporates responses to critics we’ve already published.
Number 10, 2022’s: Devil’s Advocate: Facing My Inner Anti-Catholic
D-tier. I think the pandemic had us all thrown off our game but I think I was off my game in the aftermath. I’m just not a fan of this book. The biggest thing I don’t like is the cover because usually when you put the author himself on the cover, or even just pictures of people, it doesn’t age well. I get what our production team was going for here with me seeing an evil version of myself in a mirror, but I just don’t like it.
This was also my first and probably last experiment in writing a dialogue book. Basically, I wanted to write a dialogue with my inner skeptic so that I could have a format to address what I consider to be the toughest objections to Catholicism. But really, the toughest objections probably need the most rigorous answers and you need traditional chapters and footnotes to do that. It’s interesting to read, but it feels like a tchotchke, or a neat trinket, more than a substantive contribution to apologetic discourse.
It was a still a fun enterprise and I think there are solid apologetics in this book I don’t cover in other books, but it’s still on the bottom rung of the books I’ve written. If you want to read really good Catholic dialogue books, I recommend the Peter Kreeft books that inspired me to write Devils Advocate especially the Unaborted Socrates and Between Heaven and hell.
Number 11: 2023’s When Protestants Argue Like Atheists
C-tier. I think I started to get into my more experimental phase of book writing at this point which can be really good or really not so good.
I’m at least glad it isn’t just another apologetic book on a topic that has been done to death. The point of the book is that many of the arguments Protestants make against Catholicism also undermine Christianity as a whole, like saying Catholic sacred tradition relies on unreliable oral testimony, even though our knowledge of the Old Testament and even the Gospels also comes from oral testimony.
I wanted to help Protestants avoid these arguments that undermine our shared Christian faith, but for many people the book’s title comes across as an attack on the character of Protestants, which wasn’t my intention. Also, it might have been too narrow of a thesis for a book length treatment, but I’m still grateful for at least putting the thesis out there for other Catholics to build on and include in their discussions with Protestants.
All in all, it’s started me on a path in future book projects to get back to basics.
Number 12, 2024’s: Confusion in the Kingdom: How ‘Progressive’ Catholicism Is Bringing Harm and Scandal to the Church
B-tier. It’s really weird to see how the winds of discourse can shift so quickly but even into the early 2020’s it felt like liberal and progressive Catholicism was getting a lot of air time and was a big topic of discussion among Catholics. It felt like you couldn’t go a few months without Fr. James Martin making a kerfuffle online. But now I barely hear from many of these persons and groups so that’s kind of taken the wind out of the book’s sails.
But I’m still keeping it in B-tier because it is a very rigorous reply to the common ways liberal Catholics cause confusion in the Church, like when they say it’s discriminatory to fire teachers in so-called same-sex marriages when Protestants are allowed to work in Catholic schools or when they say to be truly pro-life you have to be pro-gun control and pro-immigration.
Originally, I called the book Answering Liberal Catholicism: Responding to Confusion in the Kingdom but the title was changed in production and the cover, while very artistic, doesn’t really communicate what the book is about. And while you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, people still do that which may have diminished the impact. But it could also have been that the book would have been more effective if I had written the book back in the mid-point of Pope Francis’s pontificate instead of at the tale end of it where progressive Catholicism’s impact started to fade out.
But as I said, I’m glad I wrote it even if writing on current discourse subjects can cause a book to lose impact when the discourse isn’t current. As Henry David Theorue said, “Read not the time, read the eternities.”
And finally, number 13, my most recent book 2025’s Salvation is from the Catholic Church.
A tier. I’d call this a return to form in that I’m focusing on what matters most, how to get to heaven, and engaging Catholic and protestant disagreements on this issue involving questions people will still be talking about decades or even centuries from now.
Our editor really helped me during the writing process and encouraged me halfway through to not let the book be a slow burn that meticulously answers objections, but to come out the gate swinging, which I did by presenting ten ways God uses the universal Church established by Jesus Christ to save us.
This includes the Church giving us right theological and moral beliefs, right worship and sacraments, the right pastors, the right spiritual reinforcements, and even the right proofs and wonderful signs that confirm the Church’s divine mission. I then go through 15 common objections to the Catholic plan of salvation and I’ve written in it in a way that isn’t trying to take cheap shots at protestants or reduce all of Protestantism to just cringey mega churches.
If you want other great books that go deeper on the Church’s teaching on salvation see my colleague Karlo Broussard’s books on baptism and purgatory, Jimmy Akin’s the Drama of Salvation, and Salvation: What Every Catholic Should Know by Michael Barber.
So those are the books and going forward I’m feeling God really putting me on a trajectory of focusing on bringing the most number of people who are the furthest away from Christ into communion with him and his Church. That’s what I want to focus on so I have some more book projects in the wings ready to do that and if you want to help us create those books please support the Counsel of Trent at trenthornpodcast.com because your support allows me time to write books along with writing episodes for the channel.
And don’t’ forget to register for our April 11th conference in Dallas where you can meet over 30 Catholic online creators and hear great talks on how to evangelize our culture, just go to conference of trent dot com.
Thank you for watching, leave a comment below about what you think fo these books, and I hope you have a very blessed day.