Something my younger brother and I enjoy sparring over is the validity of the claims of Eastern Orthodoxy. Like me, my brother is Catholic, but he does an admirable job of engaging sympathetically with the best Orthodox arguments. He also happens to know a lot more about the topic than I do. In an effort to remedy this disparity, I recently embarked on reading Erick Ybarra’s recent book The Papacy: Revisiting the Debate Between Catholics and Orthodox.
Some 750 pages later, I certainly feel more educated than I did before. Ybarra writes with clarity and precision and he has done the Church a great service in producing such an erudite and detailed tome. He also provides a model for ecumenical dialogue between Christians. His tone is unfailingly generous and humble, and he always gives his interlocutors a fair hearing.
