Bread Body SpiritEdited and with introductions by Alice Peck (Skylights Path Publishing, 2008) This is a book that will make you hungry. You’ll be hungry for the rich curried vegetable soup in the chapter entitled “The Parable of the Squash,” and you’ll be hungry to take a new, more meaningful look at the meals you serve and eat.

Render Unto Caesar, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput (Doubleday, 2008)

Don’t listen to those New Atheists, says this Vatican astronomer. You shouldn’t have to choose between science and faith.

There is no particular person author Ann Patchett has looked to for inspiration. Instead, she credits her Catholic faith for teaching her a boundless capacity for creativity and appreciation for metaphor. Patchett has harnessed that power to her audience: She is the recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize (2002) and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for her novel Bel Canto, which sold more than 1 million copies in the United States and has been translated into 30 languages.

A U.S. Catholic baker's dozen

Here are a few books U.S. Catholic editors think are worth adding to your reading list this month

By William T. Cavanaugh (Eerdmans, 2008) Luke tells us in Acts 2 that the earliest Christians formed economic communities shaped by the Eucharist, sharing their resources as they broke bread together. William Cavanaugh’s new work on eucharistic economics argues that contemporary Christians should also form their economic lives in light of our eucharistic faith.

By Ron Hansen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) The pivotal moment in Ron Hansen's Exiles comes almost exactly midway through the 225-page book. A fellow Jesuit seminarian scans a poem that Gerard Manley Hopkins is writing about the 1875 shipwreck of the German passenger ship the Deutschland and expresses befuddlement at its odd rhymes and rhythms.

By Andrew Krivak (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) What happens when a young person in a secular age feels God calling him to a decidedly countercultural way of life?

By Jim Wallis (HarperOne, 2008) Jim Wallis' prayers seem to have been answered.