Critics' choices for Christmas.

The works of Roger Kahn aside, sport writing is usually not a genre one looks to for deep insight into sociology, economics, and politics. Which is why Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (HarperCollins, $24.95, 272 pp.) is such a delightful book. A passionate fan of "the beautiful game," Foer uses soccer as a way to explore the questions raised by globalization: why have some nations remained poor, even as they have received unprecedented amounts of foreign investment? Why has the era of globalization been characterized by an intensification of tribalism and ethnic conflict?

The strength of the book is its reporting rather than any attempt to develop detailed answers to these questions. The way Foer demonstrates how soccer is entwined with important economic and political forces makes for fascinating reading. He tells us about everything from the eager participation of Red Star Belgrade supporters in the ethnic cleansing of Yugoslavia to the role of the Iranian national soccer team as a force for democratization.

Commonweal readers may be particularly interested in the chapter where Foer details how the Glasgow Rangers soccer team has largely replaced the Church of Scotland as the intergenerational transmission belt for anti-Catholicism in the northern United Kingdom. Globalization devastated the firms that supported Glasgow's Protestant establishment and allowed Catholics to approach economic parity. But ethnic tensions persist, as evidenced by the frequency with which the chant "F--the pope" wafts its way across the field at matches between the historically Protestant Rangers and their crosstown Catholic rival Glasgow Celtic.

One of the themes of Foer's book is the persistence of a sense of history and tradition in the face of globalization. The need to recover a sense of history is also the lesson of a new book by John Judis, The Folly of Empire (Scribner, $24, 256 pp.). Judis, a colleague of Foer's at the New Republic, suggests that over the past four years the United States has managed to forget virtually all of the lessons it learned about the conduct of foreign policy during the previous one hundred.

Judis takes his readers back to the early years of the twentieth century, when after easily winning the Spanish-American War, the United States annexed the Philippines. The result was a brutal war of occupation which dragged on for fourteen years. Before it was over, about one hundred and twenty thousand American military were deployed and more than four thousand died; more than two hundred thousand Filipino civilians and soldiers were killed.

The failure of the Philippine venture had an impact on Theodore Roosevelt, who led the country during the war, and subsequent presidents like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. These men came to realize the importance of international institutions and alliances as a way of preserving the peace and advancing the aims of U.S. foreign policy.

Judis recounts this history as a pointed critique of the Bush administration's foreign policy, suggesting that it fails to reflect the lessons of the nation's past. Historians may quibble with some details in his account--particularly the idea that the struggle over colonial possessions was the key cause of World War I--but on the whole the argument is effective.

After reading so much about war, ethnic cleansing, religious violence, and economic inequality, I found myself in need of prayer. How nice, then, to encounter the book The Words We Pray (Loyola Press, $11.95, 210 pp.), by Our Sunday Visitor columnist and Catholic blogger Amy Welborn. The book is an effort to recover the richness of traditional Catholic prayers such as the Hail Mary, the Salve Regina, and the Morning Offering, just to name a few.

Older Catholics who had these prayers drilled into their heads as children may wonder at the point of such a book. But Welborn is writing for a younger generation, many of whom were taught, as she was, that "the only real prayer was mental prayer--that very personal and subjective experience that was mine alone--and that anything else, especially if it involved praying with words that someone else had written, was not worth my time."

Each of the chapters takes a traditional prayer and recounts the history and traditions associated with it. Readers will learn the interesting history of Hermann Contractus, the author of the Salve Regina and Alma Redemptoris Mater. Born severely disabled and placed in the care of monks at the age of seven, Brother Hermann wrote a history of the world since the time of Jesus and one of the first European geometry textbooks, and directed the construction of clocks and musical instruments.

There is a reassuring solidity to these ancient prayers, like old tools that both shape and are shaped by the hands that use them. Welborn's book is a good reminder that in times of empire and war, Christians may need to draw upon resources greater than our own inner depths.

J. Peter Nixon recently gave up his blog (sursumcorda.blogspot.com) to study at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. He is an occasional contributor to the Catholic press.