My Top 100 Non-Fiction Books, Part 1

First, you must understand that these are not really my top 100 non-fiction works.  Rather, they are among the top non-fiction works that I have read.  At some point in my life, they changed, re-directed, reinforced, or challenged my thinking.  In some cases, the books may have simply brought me great pleasure, and that is a great thing for a book to do.

Second, I have allowed myself to only pick one title by an author.  (I cheated a few times on this also.)  I will mention often that an author listed below has more good titles.

Third,  I keep remembering things that should be on this list.  That is why I have a book blog.

Fourth, I don't endorse everything in a book that I really like, nor do I approve of all the author's views in other books and other areas.

Fifth, the list is in alphabetical order.  I could probably decide which books were in the top five or ten, but there is no way I could decide which book is number 67 and which is 68.

Sixth, I love book lists.

1. Above All Earthly Powers by David Wells.  First of a series of four great studies of theology and the current culture of church and society.

Rick Bragg writes a book honoring his Mamma.  Great Southern writing.

2. All Over But the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg.  Bragg may be the best Southern writer around today.  Much of his stuff is autobiographical.

3. America B.C. by Barry Fell.  Fell's books change the way we view Columbian and pre-Columbian America.  I think the Punic Wars caused the end of world wide explorations.
4. Art and the Death of a Culture by Hans Rookmaaker.  Defining work by the major Calvinist and Dooyeweerdian art critic of the 20th century.  I want his complete works!

5. The Art of Teaching by Jay Parini.  Parini's biographies of Frost and Faulkner are also good.  I love this book.

6. Big Chief Elizabeth by Giles Martin.  Answered the question of what happened to the settlement at Roanoke.

Compares with Schaeffer's How Should We Then Live?

7. The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization by Vishal Magalwadi.  A thorough study of Western Civilization from an outsider's viewpoint.

8. A Bridge Too Far by Cornelius Ryan.  Ryan's trilogy on World War II (which includes The Longest Day and a book about the capture of Berlin) are among the best books on that war.

9. Building a Christian Worldview by W. Andrew Hoffecker and Gary Scott Smith.  Two great volumes on a number of events and issues concerning Christians.

10. The Calvinistic Concept of Culture by Henry Van Til.  Religion is culture externalized.

Hanson is an outstanding military historian, political commentator, and classicist.

11. Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson.  ALL of Hanson's histories are worth obtaining.

12. Children of the Promise: The Biblical Case for Infant Baptism by Randy Booth.  This book changed my life.  But it has not diminished my love and appreciation for my Calvinistic Baptist friends and mentors.

13. The Christian Almanac by George Grant and Gregory Wilbur.  A wealth of information and sidelights and topics for the Christian student.

14. A Christian View of Men and Things and Historiography: Secular and Religious by Gordon Clark.  Two weighty studies.  No history should be without Historiography.

Calvinist philosopher Gordon H. Clark

15. Christianity and European Culture: Selections from the Writings of Christopher Dawson and The Dynamics of World History by Christopher Dawson.  The test of true friendship with me:  What do you think of Christopher Dawson?  Great historian.

British Catholic historian and author Christopher Dawson:  I want all his books.



Think About the Bible and Jesus Christ

The Life of the Mind and the Love of God



A Sequel to a pivotal study

Iron sharpens iron, and God gives different gifts to men. 
As it happened, John Piper and Mark Noll were roommates while in college at Wheaton.  Their kingdom labors have been far different.  Both have excelled in their fields and both have written a bevy of books.  I confess to being impoverished in regard to literary labors, but I am, as always, working to overcome that deficit.both men's

Both men have fairly new books that are on a related topic:  The Christian Mind.   Piper's book is simply titled Think and his old buddy, Mark Noll's, gives that thinking an intellectual anchor in Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind. It is obliged of every Christian who writes on the topic of the Christian mind and thought to pay sufficient homage to Harry Blamires, whose book The Christian Mind, appeared in 1963.  The opening line set out the contours of the battle:  There is no longer a Christian mind.

That line was a wake-up call.  It did not mean that there were no smart Christians around, for in 1963, C.S. Lewis could have sat down with Cornelius Van Til, Herman Dooyeweerd, Flannery O'Connor, T.S. Eliot, and quite a few other brainy or artistic Christians.  But as far as the Christian community and Church having intellectual ideas that were plowing over the opposition in the modern world Areopagus (Acts 17), it just was not happening.  And still generally isn't.

Christians sometimes get to fire a few salvoes of wisdom across the rotting bow of modernity's battlefleet, but we are far from the cutting edge of cultural issues.  Quite often, Christians just are not taught how to think.  There are, for example, very few believers who can intelligently and calmly discuss the merits of their denominational rivals.  At best, we are usually condescending and patronizing, and more often, we are misinformed and insulting. 

John Piper's short book, Think,  is an attempt to call Christians to the front of the classroom in order for them to begin being students.  He makes note of books written by other Christians dealing with intellectual improvements, and these include his old roommate and contributor to the preface to Think, Mark Noll, along with Gene Edward Veith, Os Guinness, and James Sire.  If Piper's book were simply to call attention to these authors, it would serve us well.  But he goes further.  The intent of Think is not to restore logic to the curriculum or encourage bibliophiles like me to buy more books or to suggest that we gather at the coffee shop to discuss philosophy from a Christian perspective. (And I like all three of those ideas.) 

Piper's goal is for believers to think about the Bible.  There will be no Christian thinking in a worldviewish sense if there is not Christian thinking in regard to the Bible.  The hands-in-the-cookie dough of this book comes from his working through various texts of Scripture and ideas growing out of Scripture that, misunderstood or misapplied, might discourage or minimize Christian thought.  This is not a deep, profound, esoteric book, yet I have read it twice and find myself longing for a teaching seminar or other occasion to read through and think more about this book.

Being in the sermon-making business, sometimes...all too often...I have to whip out a recipe quickly.  Find a text and a subject,  add 2 or 3 anecdotes, find a good quote, add a funny line,  divide into 3 portions, mix in doctrine and applications, let set for 24 hours, serve...and hope God blesses the inadequacies.  So I need the constant lessons of a book like Think. 

Christian school teachers, along with pastors, elders, and Sunday school teachers need this book.  Maybe it should go to our lists for students heading off to college.  Who, after all, doesn't need more exhortation and encouragement and mentoring and reminders to think? 

Piper deals with the topics of Relativism and Anti-intellectualism. There are always "Isms" lurking around that seek to undermine Christian thought and action or to directly attack them.  Like a journey with Natty Bumpo and Chingachgook through a James Fenimore Cooper novel, there are dangers all around.  No sooner has a Huron been dispatched to his happy hunting ground than some Frenchman, or bear, or storm, pops up threatening the forest-wise travelers.  (And we realize that it would have taken Fenimore Cooper six pages to have stated what I just said.)  I deal with Relativism constantly--in my heart, in my students, in my family, and in my church.  Even when we do not walk the aisle to ask Relativism in our hearts, we imbibe the spirit of our times (the Zeitgeist).  Anti-intellectualism is just as rampant.  Although the simple minded country-church believer may be an example of it, the greater, high-handed sin of anti-intellectualism comes from people who are in thinking environments and are trained to think, but don't think in areas of Christian living.

To use just one quote from the book:  "The task of all Christian scholarship--not just biblical studies--is to study reality as a manifestation of God's glory, to speak and write about it with accuracy, and to savor the beauty of God i it, and to make it serve the good of man."  Just one quote!  The book is over 200 pages of this kind of stuff.

Mark Noll's Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind is a great companion volume for Think.  But the two books are not the same.  These are not two varieties of the same topic.  Noll is more focused on the academic life.  It is the scholar-by-trade  more than the Sunday school teacher who needs to read Noll's book.  (Although, Sunday school teachers, there is gold in them-thar hills for you too.)

Dr. Noll centers much of his study on the academic implications of Jesus Christ by focusing on one of the most tightly organized, well constructed, philosophical and theological documents ever written--the Nicene Creed.  Whether one regularly quotes from the Nicene or Apostle's Creed or both, it is easy to fall into rote recitation and to forget the powerful content of these creeds.  There is enough compressed theological and philosphical and intellectual material to explode the world many times over.

At this point, I am still working my way through Noll's book.  Today I was reading from the chapter titled "Christology: A Key to Understanding History."  This book is not a Christian world-view wading pool.  It has a definte "add caffeine" component to it.  If Jesus Christ is calling some of us to "the life of the mind," we better not think that it will be easy in comparison to Christ's other demanding calls.  Christ's call entails rewards, not ease.  We are saved by grace, not works; we are not called to service by works. 

This book is a sequel to Noll's defining work The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.  Noll set a high bar then and raises it now that we have had years to practice that first jump.

Just as Piper and Noll were once roommates, now we need to make their books shelf-mates.

Not Quite Finished, But The End In Sight

Whether a few pages each night or a chapter each morning, I have been stumbling my way through several books of late.

Pleasant Diversion

There is something to be said for a good story told well.  That what this book is.  This book is the story of an American woman, Marjorie, who is married to a Frenchman.  Both are painters, and they buy a place in rural Brittany.  The driving force in the story--a true one--is a delightful, saucy, and resourceful peasant woman named Jeanne, who enables Marjorie to grow to love the village and to survive a wrecked marriage. This book fits none of the categories of my usual readings.



Sermons Worth Reading

This book is perfectly arranged for my reading schedules.  On most days, I read a chapter, and each chapter is a sermon.  Ryken does a good job of including good quotes from commentators with pertinent stories or illustrations.  Ecclesiastes really reaches a wide range of topics.



Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biography

I really did not have the time to read this when I began last August.  I have been slowly plodding through the chapters, usually late at night.  George Washington is such an illusive, powerful, and complex figure that one has to read several biographies just to begin to sense the man.  Right now, I am taking consolation in the fact that during the years when he was President, Washington was broke.  He was also in poor and declining health during those years.  And yet he did what needed to be done.

Pray for the Persecuted Church

If you are planning on going to church tomorrow, you might be consider the following precautions:  

Some instructions for tomorrow:

1. Make sure you are not being followed.

2. Conceal your Bible carefully, perhaps by having itsewn inside your coat.

3. Enter the undisclosed place we are gathering at *&^%, one or two people at a time, so as to not arouse suspicion.

4. Be careful about any strangers who show up. They may be agents.

5. Children whose parents have disowned them will be allowed to stay in homes of church members.

6. If captured and threatened, remember the crown of glory that awaits you.

7. Any who are able to make contact with members in prison, please do so, and be extra careful.

8. Know that Brothers and Sisters in Christ in free lands are praying earnestly for all of us.

If these advice seems irrelevant, then you (and I) need to be not only giving thanks for our blessings of political and religious freedom, but also praying earnestly for all those for whom the advice is a way of life. Tomorrow is a day set apart to remember and pray for the persecuted Church scattered throughout the world.

To read more, go to Grace Covenant Church .



A Western Christmas Corral

Premiering on Friday, December 16 at Veritas Academy

http://veritashumanities.blogspot.com/

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Nobel Prize Winning Russian Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn

When I was a senior in high school (1974), we were given extra points for finding news stories about a Russian writer by the name of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He was battling against the whole might of the Soviet Union. His manuscript—titled The Gulag Archipelago—had been discovered and its contents were truthfully and powerfully critical of the Soviet Communist system.

That began what has been a life-long fascination with Solzhenitsyn the man and Solzhenitsyn the writer. Out of the many pages I have read by him and about him, much of his work deals with his own terrible experiences in the Soviet Gulags—or political prisons.

The phrase of his that has most powerfully moved me is when he reflected back on how the prison system allowed him to meet thinkers and Christians and how he came to know God because of that experience.

The phrase was “bless you, prison, for having been in my life.”

One of Solzhenitsyn’s biographers, Michael Scammel coomented on that phrase, saying: “Solzhenitsyn concludes his meditation by expressing his gratitude for the years of incarceration in prisons and camps, which had enabled him to fulfill the biblical injunction “Know thyself.”

Solzhenitsyn was thankful for his terrible experiences.  The horrors of the Soviet Gulag was a blessing for Solzhenitsyn because it enabled him to return to the Christian faith of his childhood. 

Thanksgiving, as a part of the Christian experience, is so simple.  The believer can just say the words, "Thank You God," often.  Certainly, they should be said with thought and feeling, but still said often.
And yet, there is a difficult discipline to giving thanks.  By God's grace, we are not coming to know Him from experiencing the pits of the Soviet Gulags.  Yet, the world, the flesh, and the devil continue to weigh down upon us.

It is the giving of thanks in the midst of hardships that cultivates and demonstrates the discipline of thanksgiving.



Solzhenitsyn as a political prisoner.



A world and life changing book.  Volume One of The Gulag Archipelago

Strong Theology, Strong Coffee--Mornings with Books

The Defining Apologetic Trilogy of Schaeffer

Throughout the year, I have been working on reading more of Francis Schaeffer.  This trilogy is a key work, and I read the first two books of it some time back.  Only in the last few weeks did I pick it up to finish reading it.  The last work is He is There and He is Not Silent.  Schaeffer gives a good assessment of the cultural and philosophical trends of his time, with a Christian answer being presented as THE answer.  Next January will mark the 100th year since Schaeffer's birth.

Sermons, Theology, and Devotional Reading

I am sold on this book, Ecclesiastes: Why Everything Matters, the author, and the series.  Dr. Philip Graham Ryken is the President of Wheaton College and a very good writer and preacher.  This book consists of sermons he preached through the book of Ecclesiastes.  These sermons make for fine reading, filled with great quotes and anecdotes, exegetical insights, and practical applications.  After years of reading commentaries, I have now become convinced of the method behind this series, called "Preaching the Word." Pastors and laymen alike can profit from good solid sermons that unfold the meaning and use of Scripture.  Crossway Books publishes this series.  I now have several volumes from it, and I hope to acquire them all.

A Nearly Forgotten Reformer

Slowly, I am working through this weighty biography of a man who was a friend, peer, mentor, and guide to such other Protestant Reformers as John Calvin, Martin Bucer, and Ulrich Zwingli.  All too often, Bullinger is either ignored or relegated to the status of a second stringer in the Reformation.  A little tweaking of history and all of us who call ourselves Calvinists might have been calling ourselves Bullingerists.  (Calvin and Bullinger would prefer if we just called ourselves Christians.)  This biography is by George M. Ella, a very skilled and prolific author who was introduced to me by my friend David Leach.

A Sequel to The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

I am just getting into this encouraging study by Dr. Mark Noll.  I have read several of his books through the years, and I need to read more.  In the beginning, this book dealt with the concept of "Glory" which I preached on last Sunday.  Wish I had discovered this book before the sermon.