Last summer during a long car ride, my mother and I went toe-to-toe about Flannery O’Connor. One of my aunts had used her on a course syllabus and received backlash from students. My mother argued O’Connor was a remarkable thinker worth learning from. However, I asked if my aunt had named the problem of O’Connor’s often-overt racism as something to hold in tension with her positive contributions.
It was with this experience in mind that I read Rebecca Bratten Weiss’s The Books That Made Us: Deconstructing the Modern Christian Classics. Though we seem to be past the peak of claims that any criticism of a previously lauded public figure is tantamount to “cancel culture,” Bratten Weiss’s work is still timely in its exploration of questions that underlie any cancellation-esque conversations: What are we to do when we realize the art that formed us is, perhaps, problematic? How do we revisit works that formed us when we ourselves have changed? Are we to throw out the good of a work when anything bad or harmful is present? Is it possible or good to separate the art from the artist?
Bratten Weiss introduces The Books That Made Us with the context of her own often-chaotic upbringing. She paints a picture of finding comfort, companionship and community both within the pages of books themselves and outside them through her “bookish” identity. Bratten Weiss identifies the books taught as part of the classic Christian canon at her ideologically conservative Catholic college, and she describes these books as a “fortress” within which to retreat and hold ever more tightly to a worldview that sees itself as pure and correct. On this list of authors are Flannery O’Connor, G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, among others.
A series of upheavals in Bratten Weiss’s own life shook the foundation of the fortress she had built. She began asking questions that broke cracks in the foundation. Then, following the 2016 presidential election, her fortress came crumbling down as she could not reconcile her own community’s alignment with values she saw as antithetical to those of the faith they espoused.
Bratten Weiss began to call her own process “deconstruction” and was surprised to find that there was a whole community of Christians from other denominations using that term for much the same work. She notes that this became the term for a group of “influential evangelicals…publicly questioning long-held articles of faith.” Further, she explains how this public form of deconstruction is connected to the academic work of deconstructionism—which examines the “assumptions latent in a system—for instance, assumptions about light versus dark, or white versus black.” She goes on to write that “to deconstruct a system of meaning is not to attack it, but to show how it functions.”
The most compelling argument Bratten Weiss makes for the process of revisiting the stories that formed us as faithful followers of God is the tendency of white Christians to embody what the scholar Erna Kim Hackett calls “Disney princess theology,” wherein members of the community with the most power (white Christians, in the United States) see themselves as the hero of every story. Bratten Weiss quotes Hackett: “For…the most powerful country in the world, [which] enslaved both Native and Black people, to see itself as Israel and not Egypt when studying Scripture is a perfect example of Disney princess theology.”
Bratten Weiss notes that her own revisitation of books that were formative for her began when she heard the authors quoted and started to find herself responding with “What if they were wrong?” Propelled by the conviction that art is not merely entertaining but formative as well, Bratten Weiss selected nine influential Christian writers to revisit while considering the ways their work would shape the minds of their readers: G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy.
I was simultaneously impressed and impatient with Bratten Weiss’s methodical engagement of each of her nine selected authors. While I had encountered the work of many of the authors previously, there were several with whom I was unfamiliar. Bratten Weiss’s analysis was so thorough that I felt I was able to get a comprehensive understanding of each, even when I lacked familiarity. I did not anticipate I would desire to read the work of these authors, given Bratten Weiss’s purposes for engagement, but I found her analysis so nuanced that I occasionally added a new title to my “to read” list.
Throughout her discussion of each author, Bratten Weiss largely resists directive conclusions—such as offering recommendations for how to proceed with each author, or how to situate their work within our larger understanding or imagination. She instead points out the issues she identified through critical engagement and then moves on to the next author. It is this structural approach that prompted my impatience. After about three authors, I started writing notes in the margins toward the end of each chapter that said things like, “So what do we do with this?” By the time I did finally reach the conclusion, I was so eager to read Bratten Weiss’s recommendations that I found myself wanting more. I found her conclusions powerful, concise and helpful—but I just wanted to linger with these ideas a little longer.
Many of my critiques when I read works of nonfiction are mediated through my professional lens as a university campus minister. Perhaps this is why I would have enjoyed it more if Bratten Weiss had used her classroom experience to offer recommendations for engaging the work of these authors in the classroom or with young people in the context of faith formation. However, even in the absence of explicit recommendations, I was able to extrapolate from Bratten Weiss’s conclusions and imagine how I might bring this understanding into my work.
Returning to my conversation with my mother from last summer: I also read The Books That Made Us with curiosity about whether this book might be helpful to pass along to her or my aunt so they could better understand why I was so adamant that any use of Flannery O’Connor or an author with similarly known issues cannot be made without proactively addressing the problems.
I think this book starts about two steps beyond those conversations. It is best suited for people who have already been critically engaging with questions about their own religious formation and assumptions, rather than those who might encounter these questions for the first time in the introduction of this book.
The target audience seems to be those who find themselves wondering if they can still find comfort or inspiration in the books that formed them, even if those books or their creators are problematic.
To this question, Bratten Weiss’s book offers a nuanced, but resounding yes. The work is not to do away with anything problematic but instead to face any issues with clarity and critical curiosity, while also accepting that some faithful Christians may not feel comfortable engaging the work of these authors. Our literary canon has plenty of room to expand and plenty of just, diverse, creative writing with which to do so. While authors such as Chesterton, Lewis and O’Connor will remain in the canon, Bratten Weiss is clear that they no longer need to serve as its center.
This article appears in May 2026.
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