Garry Wills has two Catholic-themed books out recently:

The Rosary (out last November) and What Jesus Meant (out on March 2)

In the most recent issue of NRO, Mike Potemra considers them:

In his most recent book, What Jesus Meant (Viking, 176 pp., $24.95), Wills continues this project. Jesus, he writes, mandated neither a hierarchical Church, nor a papacy, nor a priesthood . . . and so on. To many Catholics this will be disturbing and possibly even offensive; little of it should be controversial among Protestants, at least of the low-church type. But a representative of the latter group is entitled to ask: Does the Willsian debunking of Catholicism add anything of value to Protestantism as it already exists? He is aCatholic who is highly skeptical of the Catholic distinctives; is there anything specifically Catholic that he wishes to contribute to Christianity in general?

The answer to these rhetorical questions, delightfully enough, is yes. A couple of months ago, the notoriously prolific Wills published another book, The Rosary: Prayer Comes Round (Viking, 190 pp., $24.95), which is an excellent work about a specifically Catholic form of devotion that deserves a lot more attention from other branches of the Christian community. The rosary is a combination of repetitive prayers (the Creed, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Doxology) and meditations on New Testament scenes (referred to as "mysteries"). Owing to the repeated prayers, it has been viewed with great suspicion by Protestants anxious to avoid the "vain repetitions" Jesus warned against (Matt. 6:7). But as Wills makes clear, the repetitions are actually a great aid to contemplation: "Changing the rhythm of one’s life, freeing the mind to move in a different way, involves slowing down the tempo of thought, entering a stalled state." The idea is not to wear out the divine Hearer with a rote recitation, but to calm the mind of the one who is praying — and thus enable him to focus on the Bible scenes being meditated upon. I would add another consideration: The chief impediment to prayer is distraction, and the rosary helps solve this problem by building the distraction into the prayer itself. If the mind wanders from the mysteries, it can wander to the repeated prayers — and vice versa. To wander away from the prayer entirely requires more than the usual amount of mental agility.