Andrew’s Library
These books have profoundly informed and inspired my life.
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Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. Helen Rhee offers an amazing selection of Christian writings on wealth and poverty from the second to fifth centuries across a variety of contexts. What I love about this book is that the selections are short, accessible for non-scholars, and filled with passion and power. If Marx was right that religion is “opium for the masses,” early Christian thought was the exact opposite. The centrality of radical generosity for centuries after Christ needs to be recovered today.
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Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light. This book has haunted me, terrified me, and filled me with hope. Teresa devoted herself to a life of radical Christian service, and yet she lived with a devastating sense of God’s absence. Her descriptions of her spiritual life are painful and but remind us that we’re not alone when we pass through critical seasons when God seems to disappear. This book injected fresh honesty and courage into my faith.
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St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul. Many Christians have struggled through painful seasons when God seems totally silent and absent, but this is not a new experience. Reading this 16th century classic has helped me feel less alone and insane in my own “dark nights of the soul.” John gives powerful descriptions and thought-provoking perspectives on God’s apparent absence and how some of our most important growth often takes place in the hardest seasons of our lives.
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N.T. Wright, Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. This is probably the most accessible and compelling book on what the Bible says about life after death or what Wright calls “life after life after death.” Wright’s basic argument is that Christian hope is world-affirming and energizing for our earthly lives. If you’re thinking about death, afterlife, and how all of this should affect how we live now, this is a must-read.
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C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce. This book has shaped how I think about the afterlife more than any other. I keep coming back to it and recommending it to others. In his allegory, Lewis holds open the possibility that humans can be redeemed after death, because God’s love is unconditional. He also explores how some humans might reject God’s love forever. Ultimately, heaven and hell begin now.
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Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Taylor has helped me understand where/when we are, how we got here, and what the options might be for moving forward. I highly recommend this book for college graduates who are wrestling with intellectual history and existential dislocation. A question: how does Taylor’s story about the West’s secularization interact with the increasing “resurgence” of religion today?
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Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Bellah tells a massive story across billions of years that has provoked fresh wrestling in me about evolution, ethics, and how Christians should understand and tell our story about God as creator, redeemer, and ruler in light of “deep history” and our global time. How does the biblical narrative connect to this multi-billion year story Bellah is trying to tell? Since the Bible only attempts to tell us about 7,000 years of human history, what was God doing before then? How did God love and reveal himself to our ancient ancestors? Should we hope in their resurrection? What about pre-human species – what is their moral status, if any? How do we reconcile the violence inherent in evolution as the engine of humanity’s emergence with the claim that “creation” is “all very good”?
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Evolution and the Fall edited by William Cavanaugh and James K.A. Smith is the most recent attempt by serious Christian scholars to address the questions raised by Bellah’s book. It talks about the current state of evolutionary science, its relationship to the Bible, and its implications for Christian belief and practice today. Ultimately, I found this book unsatisfying, but it is the most helpful resource I have found for refining and wrestling with these extremely important questions.
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Richard Middleton:The Liberating Image: TheImago Dei in Genesis 1. This is the most masterful and ethically important interpretation of Genesis 1 that I have read. Middleton claims that God endows the world and humanity with sacred value and gives humanity a special vocation to serve the world and other humans, instead of being valueless slaves of violent gods as in other Mesopotamian myths. Genesis 1 is the “preamble” to history that Christians must continuously recover in each generation.
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Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. This French luminary makes a rigorous philosophical argument that “givenness” is the most basic description of existence and human experience or “phenomena.” I find Marion’s argument so profound, because it means that we are not self-created and that the most fundamental mode of reality is generosity. I draw from Marion’s work that gratitude is the most important form of consciousness for human life toward God, the world, and other people.
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Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Siedentop argues that Christianity is the origin of liberalism or the recognition and respect for the value and rights of individuals regardless of religion, tribe, or status. Christianity overthrew the tribalism, elitism, and violent religion of the pre-Christian world. Thus, Christianity rather than secularism was the source of secularism’s most prized values like justice, liberty, and equality. The question is raised: can secularism and pluralism sustain these values without Christ and his government? Does the secular world need Christianity in order to survive?
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Vaclav Havel, Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990. This compilation of Havel’s writings contains “The Power of the Powerless,” which I find myself repeatedly returning to and thinking about. In my estimate, it is perhaps the most insightful essay I’ve read on the problems and possibilities of post-totalitarian societies like Ethiopia today. Havel’s ideas of “living in the truth,” “the power of the powerless,” and a politics that takes place outside the formal arena of “politics” have deeply inspired me. The powerless can be powerful in unexpected, crucial ways as a kind of responsible counter-polis. The temptation is to be the green grocer who is complicit in lies and violence.
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Jean Vanier, From Brokenness to Community. Vanier’s short lectures given at Harvard University have absolutely arrested my heart, mind, and imagination. Some of Vanier’s most profound insights are presented in this book. When I read Vanier, everything in me leaps and says, “This is what is most important in life.” Here’s a glimpse: “There is a hidden strength in being vulnerable, open, and non-violent, in being a people of the resurrection.”
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison. This collection of Bonhoeffer’s prison writings is a treasure trove of Bonhoeffer’s most intimate and insightful perspectives during one of history’s darkest periods. It contains “After Ten Years” and “Outline for a Book,” two essays worth the price of this thick volume. Bonhoeffer argues that “our relation to God is a new life in being there for others.” I found myself fighting back tears as I read the final letters written by Bonhoeffer’s mother with no reply, because her son had been transferred to a Nazi camp and executed. Friendship, romance, suffering, hope, justice, the future of Christianity – so many fundamental topics are discussed in these classic writings.
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James Davidson Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. Hunter attempts to describe how the world changes (elites, networks, wealth, high culture, government, law), and asks how Christians ought to participate in “changing the world.” I think his description is more or less accurate (sadly), and his call for a kind of Christian tragic-hopeful “faithful presence” in the midst of centers of power has stuck with me, even as I question its application. This is must-reading for Christians who care about culture and culture-making.
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Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. I found Noll’s short book to be extremely illuminating for contemporary American culture and racial conflict. What did American Christians think about slavery in the Civil War period? How were they reading their Bibles, and why did their interpretations so radically clash with each other? In what sense was the Civil War a “theological crisis,” and did that crisis ever end or does it still continue today? Perhaps the most striking and disturbing conclusions from Noll’s brilliant study include (1) the most “orthodox” readers of the Bible were among the strongest supporters of slavery, (2) even abolitionists didn’t often believe in the full equality of whites and blacks, and (3) the Civil War itself didn’t succeed in transforming American racial prejudice.
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Jack Balkin, Living Originalism and Constitutional Redemption: Political Faith in an Unjust World. A law professor at Yale, I think Balkin is brilliant, and his vision of constitutional interpretation – combining originalism and revision – has influenced how I think about Scripture as the founding text for Christianity. These two books are more interesting to me than any theoretical work in biblical interpretation, even though Balkin doesn’t talk about the Bible. They’re also extremely helpful for thinking about contemporary debates about the American Constitution, historical injustice, and how to move forward.
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Carter Lindberg, Love: A Brief History through Western Christianity. This book offers an incredibly interesting and well-written history of love. Is love primarily an ascent to God beyond this world, and thus is neighbor-love either a means-to-an-end or a distraction rather than an intrinsic good (Plato, Augustine)? Or, is love something that God gives to the world of creation and human persons, such that neighbor-love is a true fulfillment of divine love and something intrinsically valuable (Paul, Luther, Kierkegaard)? This book is a great place to start for understanding how people have thought about love throughout western history.
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The Ge’ez Acts of Abba Estifanos: This account of the martyrdom of this 15th century Ethiopian monk has made a huge impression on my thought and the way I aim to live, particularly in relation to society and politics. Estifanos was killed for challenging the (Christian!) king’s authority, because he thought it was idolatrous and abusive, rather than faithful to Scripture and neighbor-love. Estifanos was committed to serving the poor and welcoming the persecuted despite the cost of his life. This text offers a challenging vision for Christian engagement with society in Ethiopia. Estifanos’s discourses are beautiful and good.
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Jonathan Glover: Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century. Glover documents the major horrors of the 20th century (100 people were killed in war every hour of the 20th century!), shows the monstrous brutality of which humans are capable, and wrestles with Nietzsche’s nihilism and other philosophers’ silence in the face of violence. It’s an honest appraisal of who we are and what we’re capable of. I’m not ultimately persuaded by Glover’s argument about what to do going forward, but his book is extremely thought-provoking.
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David Livingstone Smith, Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. What is “dehumanization”? Why do we do it to other humans? What happens when societies accept it? How can we fight it? Livingstone’s book is a fascinating and challenging study that engages these urgent questions.
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Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War. Maass gives a gripping account of the Bosnian genocide from a well-researched, often first-hand perspective as a journalist who worked in the region at the time. He asks how neighbors go from living together peacefully to killing one another and raping one another’s wives. His perspectives are provocative and point to the urgent importance of loving our neighbors as ourselves.
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Augustine, Confessions. Augustine’s book is one of the first intellectual autobiographies in Western history. For Augustine, being truly human means to live continuously in confession, to hear in all creation the cry, “He made us!”, and to give thanks to God for every thing. It is a life of honesty, awareness, and gratitude. Over 1500 years old, this book never grows old and always provokes new insight.
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Augustine, The City of God (Penguin Classics). Augustine’s masterwork gives a piercing analysis of the “two cities” driven by “two loves” – the city of humanity driven by a lust for domination and the city of God driven by love for others. The City of God embodies the first tour de force in cultural and political criticism from a Christian perspective. Augustine writes, “Let us strip off the deceptive veils, remove the whitewash of illusion, and subject the facts to a strict inspection” (III, 14). Every serious Christian – and many others – after Augustine have wrestled with this massive book. Over a thousand pages long, I recommend starting with books 1, 11, 14, and 19.
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Plato, Republic (translated by Alan Bloom). Plato’s Republic is the first systematic book on the nature of justice, human selfhood, and political order. Unfolded through clever dialogue, Plato’s insights on the interconnections between who we are inside ourselves and the state of society outside ourselves are endlessly interesting. His comments on the four psychological and political regimes – timocracy (honor-rule), oligarchy (money-rule), democracy (mass-rule), and aristocracy (elite-rule) – are extremely thought-provoking. Of course, his parable of the cave and discussion of true enlightenment in Book 7 is unforgettable. When read slowly and critically, this 300-page book will change your life.
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Machiavelli, The Prince (Norton Critical Edition, 2nd Edition). Machiavelli’s Prince is the first modern handbook in power politics. What really drives people? Is it better to be feared or loved? How do you maintain power and destroy enemies? What happens to politics when God is out of the picture? This short pamphlet gives a crucial window into the political philosophy that has driven much of modern history and human history in general.
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Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New. This is an extremely fascinating history of the idea of newness or novelty throughout Western civilization, ranging from philosophy, science, art, literature, and beyond. North helped me understand why I think newness is so important and also why I think we must be so critical and suspicious of our drive to fabricate novelty: it is often the quest to be god. The book also gave me another angle for thinking about entrepreneurialism and start-up culture.
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Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: Levinas convinced me that “ethics is first philosophy” and that the heart of ethics is our relationships with others. I don’t agree with everything Levinas writes, but he will always be foundational for my intellectual and spiritual formation. The other cannot be encompassed and comprehended by thought (“totality”); the other must be welcomed and served in love (“infinity”). Philosophy at its best is the wisdom of love.
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Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. Arendt understood beginnings, human freedom, and our condition as agents better than anyone else. Her work as an analyst of the human condition is astonishing. I’ve found her vision of promise-keeping, forgiveness, and human finitude especially valuable and important.
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Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: Better than any other intellectual, Nietzsche saw what is truly at stake in the rejection of Christianity: nihilism and the will to power. This provocative little book gives a window into some of Nietzsche’s most fierce critiques of Christianity and his own philosophy of life.
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment. Can humans be good without God? Is there hope for redemption after terrible failure? Who are we, and what does it mean to be human? Dostoyevsky’s story will always be the secret gospel in everything I read, think, and hope to believe and live as a Christian. Somehow in the banality and horror of human evil, God is present, especially in the suffering, and God promises resurrection. God’s agent of redemption is often the one we least expect.
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Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. What do humans need to flourish? How should we approach development in the face of extreme poverty? I find Nussbaum’s account accessible and energizing. She’s one of the most sensible and compelling philosophers writing today.
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Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love. Lily and I have read and reread this collection of King’s sermons. Lily often comments that she is amazed that King could pack so much wisdom into such short, accessible meditations. I agree. I don’t know of a more inspiring book on love, justice, and forgiveness in the face of hatred and violence. This is King at his best.
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Radical Christian Writings: A Reader. This collection offers sixty-three excerpts from thought-provoking Christians from the second to the twentieth century on crucial topics like wealth and poverty, war and peace, oppression and resistance, women and leadership, race and equality, the body and sexuality. The book includes helpful introductions and accessible selections on these and other important issues. The best thinkers in Christian history have not accepted the status quo but risked their lives for greater freedom, justice, and equality out of their love for Jesus.
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