Ten Key Books

What books influenced me most? Here is an updated list of ten that have formed my thought life, my spiritual life, my sense of aesthetics, and how I view and interact with the world.

After making the list I noticed that I read most of them before I was twenty-five. And I suppose that’s to be expected. In mid-life and beyond, I’ve largely been shaped (though hopefully not set in stone). I present these books here roughly in the order in which I read them.

Hamlet—I had a stellar high school English teacher who spent weeks taking us line by line through what he called the greatest play by the greatest author in history. Mr. Ryan opened our eyes to a feast so we could partake of a whole new world of life, ideas, emotion, and drama. Though I didn’t quite grasp it at the time, Hamlet grounded me in notions of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Escape from Reason—Francis Schaeffer’s book taught me that ideas had consequences and that Christians could engage the world of philosophy and learning with confidence.

Mere Christianity—Lewis’s classic still stands as a landmark of clear thinking. Just the other day I was talking with someone who said we can only know for certain what is objective. Lewis’s thoughts on self-contradiction modeled for me how to respond: “But isn’t your statement about objectivity itself a subjective judgment?”

How to Read a Book—Mortimer Adler’s and Charles Van Doren’s essential guide shows us a wide variety of ways to understand and appreciate what we read. More than that, this still widely used volume taught me much about how to think.

The Lord of the Rings—Tolkien’s trilogy showed me the power of imagination. In creating a fictional world of orcs, wizards, Hobbits and Ents, he made courage, honor, faith, friendship, goodness, truth, and love believable in our world too.

Knowing God—Early in my adulthood J. I. Packer focused me on the centrality of what we were made for, of what brings true wisdom, and on what the essence of eternal life is—to know God. And there my attention remains.

Watership Down—The structure, characters, action, setting, themes and tone of this near perfect novel are so skillfully and compellingly presented that we forget we are reading a 400-page book about rabbits.

The Cross and the Prodigal—I read this in the mid-1970s, in its original Concordia edition. Kenneth Bailey so revolutionized the way I read the New Testament that I was delighted to bring it back into print at InterVarsity Press in 2005.

The Sparrow—Mary Doria Russell’s novel, set in the near future, is a thoroughly profound, readable, and gripping meditation on ultimate questions and on walking with those who suffer. The characters on this multi-year journey are not only supremely believable but are so fascinating, intelligent, mature, and likeable that I wished I could have joined them. And I did.

Jesus and the Victory of God—This tour de force by N. T. Wright still astonishes in its ability to challenge academic conventional wisdom on the one hand and the church on the other. Here is a book that unveils the cosmic, multi-dimensional achievement of Jesus.

The Surprising Path to Truth

“We each have our own truth.”

You’ve probably heard that or something like it for years. We can’t determine absolute right or wrong, it is said, and we certainly shouldn’t try to impose our view on anyone else. Instead, let’s be tolerant of each other, and give everyone space.

Christians often see a major problem with viewpoints like this, sometimes called relativism, because we believe God revealed himself and his truth through Scripture and through Jesus who is “the way, the truth, and the life.” As a result, we can know right from wrong.

If people could just get on board with there being a way to know truth, wouldn’t we all be better off? We certainly don’t need a jumble of different viewpoints confusing the landscape. Right?

This way of thinking, however, may miss something valuable. It’s wrong to say that valuing different opinions means we can never find the truth. Rather, valuing different opinions is one of the best ways to arrive at the truth.

Why is that so? Other people probably know things and can see things we don’t. After all, we are finite. Therefore, humility is a virtue.

In addition, because “the heart is deceitful above all things,” we may fool ourselves into thinking we only have the best intentions in voicing our beliefs. We may unknowingly be acting and speaking from less than honorable motivations. Therefore, once again, humility is a virtue.

As Shirley A. Mullen has written in her much needed book, Claiming the Courageous Middle, “Allowing a measure of legitimacy for diverse opinions is, in the long run, not at all necessarily giving way to relativism. Rather, it can be part of an ultimate commitment to the truth, as society makes space for an appropriate exchange of ideas within the circle of its larger commitments.”*

If we always think we are right, we’ll miss the truth. If we are willing to admit that we may sometimes be wrong (which realistically is not hard to imagine for any of us), we then have a better chance of arriving at what is good, true, and beautiful.

Because iron sharpens iron, because we all need each other, Mullen goes on to say, “We often need the animating challenge of dissent to keep us thinking at our best and to keep pushing us toward new possibilities.”* Rather than trying to suppress contrary opinions, we are better together.

If we can’t know everything and yet care about the truth, we will say, “Relativism, no. Pluralism, yes.”

* Shirley Mullen, Claiming the Courageous Middle (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2024), pp. 127, 133.

Image by Mirosław i Joanna Bucholc from Pixabay

Tired of Being Jerked Around?

Are you tired of extreme predictions of both an eco-apocalypse and a techno-utopia? You know what I mean:

Be Afraid: The world will run out of oxygen in 8 years!
Have No Fear: Renewable energy will eliminate all carbon emissions!
Be Afraid: Sea level cities will soon be inundated with water!
Have No Fear: AI will clean the world’s water supply!

Instead of being jerked around by social media and news media, wouldn’t you rather listen to someone who is knowledgeable and reasonable, who is neither optimist nor pessimist? If you want some level-headed perspective, stop following the news and start reading How the World Really Works. Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus of the University of Manitoba, has studied all this for decades, and will at once blow your mind and improve you mind.

What’s really going on with energy? In 1975 oil supplied 45% of the world’s energy. In 2019 it was 33%. (Natural gas, wind, and solar have made the difference.) But the world simply can’t go all electric because we have no way to store massive amounts of electricity—and electric jets? Not in our lifetime.

What really makes the world go round? Besides energy, four key material pillars hold up modern civilization, all of which depend on carbon fuels. At the dinner table I asked the family to make a guess. Maybe you’d like to try.

I was impressed that they came up with three of the four—steel, plastics, and concrete. We’ve seen huge increases in these—which all dependent on high levels of energy to create.

What’s the fourth? Surprisingly, ammonia—whose nitrogen content makes it key for producing fertilizer which in turn made 75-year-old predictions of mass starvation laughable. But we must not forget that lots of oil is still needed for that and for the plowing, planting, harvesting, processing, and transporting of food.

Wait. There’s more! With all the fad diets out there, how do you decide which one will give the longest life? It’s not that hard, Smil says. Look at the countries with greatest longevity and copy them. Two at the top are Japan and Spain. Since their diets are quite different, you have a choice.

What’s actually happening with globalization, with global warming, with contagious diseases? This book has so much sensible, even-handed information on all these and more.

Granted, Smil has a lot of numbers. But he does his best to make big ideas and trends very understandable. Throughout he uses everyday examples to keep us on track. For example, getting two pounds of chicken to the table requires about half a wine bottle of crude oil.  

I love books that give a big picture like Jared Diamond’s Upheaval and Hans Rosling’s Factfulness. They are so much more informative than the annoying, irrelevant, and sensationalized snippets that flood our daily news feeds. To find out what’s really going on, instead spend your time with books like How the World Really Works.

The King on the Cross

The tension has been building. For three years Jesus has taught and performed miracles, creating controversy as he goes. Who is this man?

Early in Mark’s gospel Jesus indirectly made the connection between his arrival on the scene and the arrival of the kingdom of God. At other points Mark also linked him to King David (Mk 2:25; 10:47-48; 11:10; 12:35-3), and his Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem suggested his royal status by riding on an animal with his path being covered with branches.

Finally, all these hints and suggestions dramatically come together in high relief as Jesus is, for the first time, explicitly named king six times in Mark 15.

15:2 “Are you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate.

15:9 “Do you want me to release to you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate,

15:12 “What shall I do, then, with the one you call the king of the Jews?” Pilate asked them.

15:18 And they began to call out to him, “Hail, king of the Jews!”

15:26 The written notice of the charge against him read: THE KING OF THE JEWS.

15:32 “Let this Messiah, this king of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.”

The Romans and the Jews who throughout have been struggling with what to make of Jesus, now, ironically, converge on this title. Why does Mark highlight Jesus as a royal ruler just when he is being arrested, rejected, condemned, mocked, flogged, and killed? Where is the triumph and glory in that?

As Jesus told his disciples who wanted to have the honor to be at his left and right hand, suffering is the path to glory (Mk 10:37-40). Though it appears completely contrary to common sense, Jesus defeats his enemies by dying.

He shows himself to be the victorious king by trouncing his foes at the cross where he is lifted up and enthroned as king. By dying he exposed for all to see how dark and impotent were the powers of sin and death arrayed against him. At the cross those powers were unmasked, exhausted, abolished, and destroyed in their futile attempt to extinguish the King of Life.

By bringing the cross and kingship together forcefully in chapter 15, Mark is telling us that these are not two opposing aspects of Jesus. The Messiah-King and Suffering Servant are one and the same.

—

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Choose Your Rut Carefully

Angie Kim has a great message. Unfortunately, she wrapped it in an unattractive package.

Because we are human, she reminds us, we tend to carry stereotypes with us about people who are disabled. Think—talking louder to someone in a wheelchair when clearly the issue isn’t being hard of hearing.

Kim’s novel Happiness Falls alerts us to one in particular—assuming that people with physical disabilities also have mental disabilities. We may find ourselves unnecessarily talking to them more slowly or with simpler vocabulary or maybe talking about them as if they are not in the room at all.

We all need these reminders. It’s too bad that Kim serves up this healthy nourishment in an unpalatable soup. How so? The first-person narrator of Kim’s story is an immature, self-absorbed, mentally scattered person who routinely destroys evidence and obstructs justice regarding a potential crime. It is hard to be sympathetic with someone like that, and it is just too annoying and tiresome to stay inside the mind of such a person for 400 pages.

The author would have been better off writing the book in third-person omniscient or writing each part of the book from the first-person perspective of a different character in the story—the mother, the brother, the detective, the therapist, the person who is disabled. I would guess that the editor suggested such a shift, a shift the author sadly rejected.

That’s probably why, not typical for a novel, we find a lot of explanatory footnotes in the book. It’s the only way the editor could convince the author to get at least some of the extraneous, highly detailed reflections out of the narrative. But it was not enough to salvage the book, I fear.

The lesson here for writers is: choose your rut carefully. Especially for longer pieces like books, the tone had better not be too intense—whether too sweet or too depressed, too hyper or too relaxed, too mysterious or too detailed. Otherwise readers may not appreciate the value of what you have to say.

If you want readers to stick with you, when it comes to tone, less is more.

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Image by WikimediaImages from Pixabay

“I’d Never Do That!”

Mary Doria Russell had a problem.

She was teaching anthropology and came to stories of the massive mistakes explorers from the West sometimes made when they first encountered different people groups around the world. Often death, pillaging, and slavery resulted.

Inevitably, students would say something to the effect of, “Oh, I would never make a mistake like that. How could they have done something so stupid?” 

But Russell knew that even though it seemed simple, it wasn’t. How could she adequately explain that first contact is just much more difficult than we can imagine? That’s what motivated her to write her profound, wonderful, absorbing novel The Sparrow.

She imagines a group of intelligent, well-meaning, goodhearted, skilled people who make an effort to meet a species from another world. One reason I especially like the novel is that this is just a great group of people. If I were to go on a multiyear journey, these are absolutely the kind of people I would love to travel with. 

Despite this team having far more gifts, abilities, and experiences than her students or most of us, things go wrong—terribly wrong. Even the most benign actions like trying to improve nutrition for those they meet had disastrous effects they had difficulty anticipating.

Should we never try to help people in other cultures? Should we never try to fix things that seem wrong? That’s not my point.

Rather, when we do, we should approach such efforts with a maximum dose of humility. We need to give the benefit of the doubt to people who act in ways we find wrong or unenlightened. We need to learn as much as we can before we act.

Why? Because we just don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t adequately appreciate the finite, limitations of human knowledge or of our own perspective. Nor do we appreciate enough how our fallen, sinful nature can unconsciously skew our opinions about what is wrong with the world and how to fix it.

What can we do when we encounter people we think are strange or just wrong?

  • Remember how fun it is to learn new, surprising things.
  • Don’t automatically dismiss information or ideas that are contrary to our viewpoints.
  • Remind ourselves that we are finite and that our motives or emotions may be skewing our outlook in ways we aren’t aware of.
  • Ask those we are trying to help what they think would be the best ways we could be of assistance.
  • Remember that all of us—the people we are trying to help as well as those we disagree with—are people with God-given value and dignity.

Try to help others? By all means, and always with great humility.

When We Have No Answers

I have wondered and brooded over the evil in the world for decades. Why does God allow people to do such terrible things to others? Why doesn’t he just stop it all?

In ways, there are no satisfying intellectual answers. And even if there were, I think we, like Job, would still want to tell God a thing or two.

Perhaps that’s why I found Olga Dietlin’s brief reflection on suffering so worthwhile. In her blog this friend treats life’s most difficult challenges not just academically but humanly. She is honest yet hopeful.

Suffering is complex. When we try to give easy answers, we trivialize it and we trivialize others. Olga does none of that. As she says, “Perhaps all suffering is a cosmic heartache—a fracture in the beauty of Creation that cuts straight through the heart of God Himself.”

When all our speculations are done, the question that remains is who we will be in the midst of suffering. That’s why I commend her blog to you. It will only take a few minutes to read. Click on the link here. It will be worth your while.

How We Won the War

Hitler shot himself in the foot. OK, not literally. Figuratively.

He could have beaten the United States in the race to build an atomic bomb, but he didn’t. Why? In the 1930s Hitler fired some of his best scientists. Many of these realized that Germany was going to make life very difficult for them—difficult to find jobs and maybe even imprison them. So they left the country and went to England and the United States.

Why did Hitler systematically cleanse his country of these valuable citizens (and many others) who could have helped him win World War II? Because of their race, their ethnicity. They were Jewish.

Einstein was one of the first. He left Germany in 1932 and never returned due to Nazi persecution. The most famous scientist in the world quickly settled in at Princeton University in New Jersey. Many other top nuclear physicists soon left Germany for the same reason, including Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe—who all helped the Manhattan Project successfully develop the atomic bomb for the U.S.

Enrico Fermi fled Italy because new racial laws affected his Jewish wife. He led the team at the University of Chicago that created the world’s first sustained nuclear reaction in 1942.

Hitler made many mistakes that contributed to his defeat. Certainly a key error was forcing out many of Germany’s smartest, most talented, most creative people. Without them his atomic project faltered and failed. And Germany lost the war.

History tells us, if we care to listen, that countries succeed when they allow everyone in the arts, science, commerce, agriculture, construction, finance, and every other enterprise to contribute an honest day’s work. When they artificially exclude people on criteria that have nothing to do with their skill, expertise, and potential, they are simply shooting themselves in the foot.

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You can read more about this fascinating story in Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Hitler’s Gift: The True Story of the Scientist Expelled by the Nazi Regime by Jean Medawar and David Pyke.

All Those Dark Futures

The Hunger Games, The Matrix, Divergent, The Maze Runner, Ready Player One, The Road—these are just a few of the dozens of dystopian movies and novels that have exploded on the scene in the last twenty years.

Books depicting a future that has crumbled into economic, ecological, social, or dictatorial disaster are not entirely new. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells in the nineteenth century offered several versions. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1936) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), however, set the standard for the genre in the last hundred years.

The question I’ve wondered about, however, is why? Why the massive increase in number and popularity? Why all this pessimism? Sarah Irving-Stonebreaker offers one possible explanation.

The Judeo-Christian world view that history is going somewhere, that it has a purpose, has fallen out of favor. Even an atheistic worldview like Marxism which believes that history is headed somewhere—to a workers’ paradise—has also been discredited.

Such positive outlooks have been replaced by a sense that the universe is random and has no purpose. History, therefore, doesn’t matter. “History is not part of any greater story and therefore has little to teach us,” she writes. In fact, our history is merely a source of shame and oppression.* The past cannot and should not tell us who we are, how to act, or where to go.

We are left completely on our own.

While that might seem hopeful to some, it has had the opposite effect. Without a sense of connection to the past and that history is leading us somewhere, all we have left is despair about the future, which is exactly the story that dystopias tell.

Such stories can and do act as cautionary tales. Possibly the first of this genre, Jonathan Swift’s imaginative Gulliver’s Travels (1726) presented a social and political critique of his day. Even the New Testament’s Book of Revelation offers a very dark picture of the future. But it’s purpose is very different than most contemporary apocalyptic visions which may only provide a glimmer of individual hope in the midst of social despair.

Though Revelation may seem confusing, its “main theme is as clear as day: despite present trouble, God is in control, and he will have the final victory. God wins in the end, even though his people at the present live in a toxic culture and are marginalized and even persecuted…. the author’s purpose is to engender hope in the hearts of his Christian readers so that they will have the resolve to withstand the turbulent present.”**

Yes, dystopias can serve a redeeming purpose. But more is needed—the knowledge that we are not alone in our past, in our present, or in our future.

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*Sarah Irving-Stonebreaker, Priests of History (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2024), 34 and 25-28.

**Tremper Longman III, Revelation Through Old Testament Eyes (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2022), 14.

The Greatest One-Term President

When Jimmy Carter died December 29, 2024, and as Joe Biden ended his term, my daughter asked me, “Who do you think was the greatest one-term president.”  

A number of candidates came to my mind. William Howard Taft and Gerald Ford were two. But I think the best answer is George Bush Sr.

The title of Jon Meacham’s book on Bush, Destiny and Power, certainly sounds like a presidential biography. But I think a better title would have been The Good President. George H. W. Bush was not only extremely effective in foreign policy and reasonably effective domestically, he was one of the truly honorable men to hold the highest office in the country.

Jon Meacham consistently emphasizes how the values Bush learned from his parents shaped his life personally and publicly—work hard, do your best, compete to win, serve others. Yes, he came from a well-to-do background that gave him many opportunities others didn’t have, but he also knew he was expected to excel on his own.

Bush volunteered to fight in World War II and flew many combat missions, including one in which he was shot down. He left the family cocoon in Connecticut to start his own business in oil. His 1964 U.S. Senate bid in Texas was overwhelmed by the Johnson landslide. But two years later he won a Congressional seat. Then came a series of challenging assignments—ambassador to the U.N., chairman of the Republican National Committee, envoy to China, director of the CIA.

He lost the Republican nomination to Ronald Reagan but won on the ticket as Vice President in 1980 and then 1984. He showed his calm, sure-handed demeanor during the critical hours after the assassination attempt on Reagan. But his sense of loyalty got the better of him in not more strongly opposing the Iran-Contra deal.

Meacham, while clearly admiring Bush, is not afraid to mention other mistakes. Promising no new taxes in his 1988 presidential run was doctrinaire but didn’t fit the pragmatic Bush. He was then severely criticized when he worked with a Democratic congress to bring down the deficit by cutting expenses and raising revenues.

Yet he also championed the bipartisan Americans with Disabilities Act. Though politics has always been rough and tumble, hearing how Bush worked with both parties for the common good made me almost nostalgic.

His foreign policy expertise shone in his deft and understated response to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 as well as in putting together a large coalition of nations against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990-91. Again, when a coup attempted to unseat Gorbachev, he skillfully played but did not overplay U.S. support of the Soviet leader.

George H. W. Bush may not have had the communication skills of Reagan or the charisma of Clinton or the intelligence of Obama, but he may have been our best president of the last fifty years.