We all have our favorite authors and our favorite books by them. So, if we could recommend just one book by our favorite authors, what would they be? Here are a few of mine:
- John Howard Yoder – The Priestly Kingdom
- Lesslie Newbigin – Household of God
- Stanley Hauerwas – The Peaceable Kingdom
- Robert Jenson – Story and Promise
- Hans Urs von Balthasar – Love Alone is Credible
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Discipleship
What are some of the one-book recomendations that you would make from your favorite authors. And please don’t feel like you need only specify theological authors. What are the best of your favorites?
Marilynne Robinson: Gilead
Bonhoeffer: Letters and Papers
O’Donovan: Common Objects of Love
Stout: Democracy and Tradition
Barth: Word of God and Word of Man
Webster: Holy Scripture
David Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day (for fun)
Jonathan Franzen: How to Be Alone (for more fun)
Jayber Crow : Wendell Berry
Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright : Steven Millhauser
Love in the time of Cholera: Grabriel Garcia Marquez
Citizenship Papers : wendell berry
If you leave it open like that, I just might have to throw in some In Cold Blood or something, haha
The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy
Revelation Space by Alistair Reynolds
The Beauty of the Infinite by you know who
The Children’s War by J.N. Stroyer
LOTR – Tolkien
Many more….
Pannenberg: Jesus: God and Man
Robert Jenson: God after God
Jüngel: God’s Being Is in Becoming
Rowan Williams: Poems
Balthasar: The Theology of Karl Barth
J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings
Homer, The Iliad
Robert Jenson: The Triune Identity
Thomas F. Torrance: The Trinitarian Faith
R. I. Wilberforce, The Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist
John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification
E. L. Mascall, Christ, the Christian and the Church
Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist
Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason
Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Richard Swinburne, Revelation
Gerhard O. Forde, The Gospel is for Proclamation
Lesslie Newbiggin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Socidety
Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy
Will Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly
Alvin Kimel, Speaking the Christian God (okay, I just had to throw that in!)
N.T. Wright: Jesus and the Victory of God
Martin Luther: On Christian Liberty or simply the theses from the Heidelberg Disputation
Richard Baxter: The Christian Directory
George Herbert: The Temple
Eugene Peterson: Under the Unpredictable Plant
Helene Cixous: Stigmata
Hadewijch: Complete Works
Derrida: On the Name
Balthasar Glory of the Lord III: Study in Theological Style: Lay Styles
Rowan Williams: Silence and Honeycakes
Peguy: Portal of the Mystery of Hope
Dostoevsky: House of the Dead
Newman, University Sermons
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Brunner, Dogmatics vol. 2
Forsyth, The Principle of Authority
Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God
Barth, Der Römerbrief
Augustine, Confessions
Pascal, Pensées
Plato, The Republic
Herbert McCabe, God Matters
Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel
Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Dostoevsky, The Brother’s Karamazov
Proust, Swann’s Way
Steinbeck, The Grape’s of Wrath
Graham Ward, Christ and Culture or Cities of God
Dude, you are out of your mind if you don’t think The Politics of Jesus is Yoder’s best book. The Priestly Kingdom is great, and has plenty of interesting and important things to say, but in terms of boldness, clarity, groundbreakingness, and sheer unassailability, Politcs is unmatched. Think about it – how many people did The Priestly Kingdom convert to pacifism?
Massimo Camisasca, Together on the Road
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Balthasar, Heart of the World
Romano Guardini, The Lord
Antoine de Saint Exupery, The Little Prince
Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Heart/ Ethics
N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God
Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief
J. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity
Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses
Fulton J. Sheen, The Life of Christ
Viktor Frankl, A Man’s Search for Meaning
Alvin Plantinga: Warranted Christian Belief
Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
Russell Kirk: The Conservative Mind
Thomas Reid: Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets
Barth – Gottingen Dogmatics
Adam, I suppose for me the reason I put The Priestly Kingdom is not that I think its a better book and certainly not more influential. Rather, it is the book of Yoder’s that speaks most clearly and most incisively to the concerns and issues that I care the most about. As such I return to it more than any of his other books.
These books have all been very formative for me:
John Howard Yoder: The Politics of Jesus
Stanley Hauerwas: Resident Aliens
Nancy Murphy: Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism
Dan R. Stiver: The Philosophy of Religious Language: Sign, Symbol and Story
Elias Chacour: Blood Brothers
William T. Cavanaugh: Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire
Lawrence Lessig: Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
Emil Ruder: Typography
Jeremy Keith: DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model
Annie Dillard: Teaching a Stone to Talk
Dorothy Smith: The Everyday World as Problematic: Toward a Feminist Sociology
bell hooks: Teaching to Transgress
Berger and Luckmann: The Social Construction of Reality
Terry Eagleton: Ideology
Jane Addams: Twenty Years at Hull House
Martin Buber: I and Thou
Deborah Fink: Cutting Into the Meatpacking Line: Workers and Change in the Rural Midwest
Gretel Ehrlich: The Solace of Open Spaces.
Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being; Von Balthasar, Prayer; Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness or Therapy of Desire; Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; Wordsworth, The Prelude; Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death; Reinhold Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny of Man; Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith; Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust.
Maybe when this is done we could ask the one book you would want if stranded on a desert island thing?
youre all going to hell cause no one said THE BIBLE
Aquinas – Summa Theologica
John Zizioulas – Being as Communion/Communion and Otherness (I’m sorry I couldn’t help putting both)
Yoder – The Priestly Kingdom
David Bentley Hart – Beauty of the Infinite
Fergus Kerr – Theology After Wittgenstein
Herbert McCabe – The Good Life
Vladimir Lossky – Mystical Theology
All these relative ends, Halden, I don’t know. Honesty should stick to superlatives.
Augustine of Hippo: Confessions
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Discipleship
Kallistos Ware: The Orthodox Church
Vladimir Lossky: Mystical Theology
Wilfrid Stinissen: Natten är mitt ljus (The Night is My Light [on the mysticality of Saint John of the Cross])
Anonymous: The Way of a Pilgrim