The title of Frank Sheed’s Theology and Sanity combines two notions we don’t often contemplate together. Religion in 2022 seems best understood as a personal preference or a lifestyle – what does sanity have to do with it? And yet Sheed’s more than 75-year-old book offers a bracing reminder of what’s really at stake in the question of faith.

These days, almost anything passes for literature. Pick up the New York Times Book Review and its chock-full of postmodern trash posing as ‘essential reading’. Trust us, it isn’t. Here’s a list of seven truly essential pieces of literature that every man should read in his lifetime.