Academic Catholicism

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Read Benedict.

Start with the Greeks.

Joseph Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI has some pretty good books to start off with. Introduction to Christianity and his Jesus of Nazareth series are his most notable. Introduction to Christianity is very good but quite dense for an "introduction", it was written around the time he was a German philosophy teacher or something so it reflects that.

A good, but similarly dense, book you might like to read is "Theology for Beginners" by Frank Sheed. This title also feels somewhat deceptive, but it's a lot shorter than Ratzinger's book and simpler too.

A pretty good writer on the scene right now is Edward Feser. He wrote a good introduction to Thomas Aquinas, plus a large book called Scholastic Metaphysics. He also wrote a more polemical work about new atheism called "The Last Superstition" if that interests you.

Obviously you can always read the big guys like Augustine and Aquinas, but you might want to start off with secondary texts like Feser to get a good grounding in their language and ideas.

Elizabeth Anscombe wrote quite a lot of articles about Catholic ethics I think as well.

really only scratching the surface but this is a good 'in' to the more academic stuff

>fell for the catholic meme
Don't do it OP. There is nothing patrician about a bunch of fucktards on the internet reading Joyce, wanting to find fulfillment, security, and conveniant dogma in their otherwise boring lives, and "faking it until they are making it" through all the bullshit contradictions, the nonsensical and biblically ungrounded rituals, and the downright unreasonable superstitiousness that comprises the Catholic Church. Just go back to fapping. It would save you the business of lying to yourself in attempt to convince yourself that you are a positive moral entity simply for reading a religious text or sitting in a pew mechanically performing some dumb rites.
>inb4 muh jesus

>>8369465
Awesome exactly what I was looking for, took note of these recs, thanks.

>>8369507
Kek why so mad? Like I said I am not looking for spiritual purpose or guidance or whatever I just want to see what it's all about considering so much of the world believes in it and many more lives in societies shaped by its dogma.

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We have this thread once a week and somehow pic related is never mentioned. Guessing they didn't cover it in meme pseud school.

>>8369507
>reading Joyce
nice try fucknuts, I was converted to catholic and apostolic religion by Coleridge

>>8369507
all this resentment

>>8370700
I never know which one to buy

>>8370700
It's a pretty dry read. It's a codification of dogma, reading it is like reading Codex Iustinianus.
Unless you are engaging it professionally, don't, there are more interesting reads.
>>8369417
Introduction to Christianity by Joseph Ratzinger
Philosophy, God, Universities by Alasdair MacIntyre (probably the best text you can read to find more on what exactly to read, it covers only philosophy, but that is something like 20-30k pages of texts by those authors).
Aquinas by Edward Feser

These three if you are looking for specifically introductory texts.
>>8373940
I have the one from 2006 mostly worked on by Benedict XVI and his niggaz.
But the one from the early 20th century should be preferable.

Search on Amazon terms like "(Oxford/other university) Bible (guide/study)," "(Oxford/other university/Norton) Christianity (history/documents/fathers/anthology/reader)," "Christianity (Ignatius/Paulist/Wiley-Blackwell/Routledge/Hackett) press," and "classics of Western spirituality."

http://www.luc.edu/ccih/CatholicClassicsReadingList.shtml

https://thomasaquinas.edu/a-liberating-education/syllabus