Before there was a book club, there was this talk.

Sadie Woodley's first public lecture — on the life, works, and Catholic faith of J.R.R. Tolkien — is where the Great Catholic Book Club began. It was delivered at a small gathering in Iowa City, and we think it still holds up beautifully.

Sadie came to Tolkien seriously at Franciscan University of Steubenville, where dedicated coursework under formative professors shaped not just how she reads Tolkien, but how she reads everything. That depth shows here. This isn't a fan's appreciation of hobbits and wizards — it's a careful, unhurried exploration of how a deeply Catholic imagination gave rise to one of the most spiritually rich bodies of fiction in the English language.

Tolkien believed that human beings are sub-creators — that when we make stories, we participate in something God himself does. His own stories bear that out. They are full of hope, courage, and a tenderness for the human condition that never tips into sentimentality. His characters show us what we are capable of. His world insists that goodness is not naïve — it is, in the end, triumphant. Whenever Sadie needs to reaffirm her affection for mankind, she returns to The Lord of the Rings.

This is where it all started. We're glad you're here.

The Great Catholic Book Club is an online community for people who want to grow in their relationship with Jesus Christ through good literature and art, read through the lens of the Catholic faith. We believe that beauty is a path to God, and that "the glory of God is man fully alive."

🌐 greatcatholicbookclub.com 📚 Current Reading List: greatcatholicbookclub.com/books ✝️ Join the Club: greatcatholicbookclub.com/join

Gloria in excelsis Deo.

Ender's Game asks one of the hardest questions in all of science fiction: what are we allowed to do to a child, if the stakes are high enough? Orson Scott Card's novel is a masterpiece of moral pressure. The adults in Ender's world are not monsters — they're desperate, and they believe they're right, and that makes everything worse. In this episode, Tyler and Sadie Woodley sit with the novel's most difficult themes: sacrifice, honor, accountability, and the question of whether moral truth bends under sufficient weight. (It doesn't. But the novel is very good at making you feel like it might.) They also bring their own experience as parents into the conversation — because it turns out that raising children, even in considerably less dramatic circumstances than interstellar war, clarifies a great deal about what we owe the small people in our care. This is the second book in the Protoevangelium Collection's journey. The questions get harder from here.

The Great Catholic Book Club is an online community for people who want to grow in their relationship with Jesus Christ through good literature and art, read through the lens of the Catholic faith. We believe that beauty is a path to God, and that "the glory of God is man fully alive." 🌐 greatcatholicbookclub.com 📚 The Protoevangelium Collection: greatcatholicbookclub.com/books ✝️ Join the Club: greatcatholicbookclub.com/join Gloria in excelsis Deo.

Flannery O'Connor wrote about grace the way a brick through a window delivers light — suddenly, violently, and with no apology.

In this episode, Sadie Woodley delivers a talk originally presented at the Iowa City Public Library, drawing on her own experience as a stranger in a strange land to explore what O'Connor's grotesque, funny, deeply Catholic fiction has to say about salvation, suffering, and the infinite value of every human person. O'Connor spent time at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and her Catholic imagination was shaped and sharpened during those years — which gives this conversation a particular resonance.

The audience that night included many non-Catholics, and the questions that followed were honest ones: about racism, about feminism, about what the Church actually teaches and why. Sadie doesn't sidestep any of it.

If you've never read O'Connor, this is a beautiful place to start. If you love her already, you'll find something new here.

The Great Catholic Book Club is an online community for people who want to grow in their relationship with Jesus Christ through good literature and art, read through the lens of the Catholic faith. We believe that beauty is a path to God, and that "the glory of God is man fully alive."

🌐 greatcatholicbookclub.com 📚 Current Reading List: greatcatholicbookclub.com/books ✝️ Join the Club: greatcatholicbookclub.com/join

Gloria in excelsis Deo.