Just a few recommendations.

Natural Law and Human Rights by Pierre Manent, translated by Ralph C. Concock. Manent is one of the most important conservative writers living. This book illustrates how the concept of natural law is being displaced by a conception of human rights that turns out to warp our politics while also being groundless. We need a conception of liberty that is necessarily tied to concepts of law and obligation.

In my continuing study of doctrines of the atonement that began with my summer of Anselm, I’ve moved on. I picked up Pierced for Our Transgressions, by Steve Jeffrey, Michael Ovay, and Andrew Sach. This is a full-on defense of the concept of penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) by Reformed theologians and pastors. PSA is rejected by most Catholic theologians in favor of a theory of vicarious satisfaction, arguing that PSA makes God the Father unjust because He doesn’t just accept Christ’s superabundant love as a payment of humanity’s debts and propitiation of His wrath, but actively metes out the punishment that sinners deserve on His Son, which vicarious satisfaction proponents argue is inherently unjust, and therefore impossible.

On the Thomistic side, I purchased Grace, Predestination, and the Permission of Sin by Taylor Patrick O’Neil.