W e’ve divided our book recommendations roughly into sections: firstly, the Classic devotional texts and masterworks from historical Christian figures; writing from major modern thinkers and scholars from the 20th century onward; and finally, novels by authors whose literary work was inspired or explored their Christian faith.
Classic Christian texts
“This is St Augustine of Hippo in North Africa, which is now in Algeria. He lived from 354 to 430 so at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century. St Augustine of Hippo wrote a huge amount and he went on a great spiritual pilgrimage from Manichaeism to Platonism and eventually found his way into Christianity. Confessions is a wonderfully personal book, but not in a lurid sense like a modern confession. The whole thing is an almost agonised prayer to God on this kind of search. One of the great things about St Augustine, like so many Christians then, but less now, is that he had a great sense of God as the source of all beauty, as well the source of goodness and truth. There is this wonderful phrase, ‘Oh thou Beauty so ancient and so fresh.’ I think that through The Confessions you get an insight into a passionate mind on a spiritual journey.” Read more...
The best books on Christianity
Richard Harries ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
“The Sinai desert is one of the most silent places in the world. Because the climate is very warm and dry, it isn’t easy to inhabit and consequently it is very quiet. It’s into this environment that the early Christians headed to experiment with what difference leading a silent life makes, and, specifically, what the effects of silence on prayer might be. What the desert travellers were up to is actually very similar in a way to what the Buddhists do: seeking inner peace and love of God. They were also seeking the meaning of kindness and hospitality – if anyone were to turn up in the desert then they would welcome them fondly. Their adventure is something Waddell describes with heartbreaking empathy.” Read more...
The best books on Silence
Sara Maitland ,
Novelist
“Julian of Norwich is something else… She lived in the little cell which you visit when you go to Norwich. She had a weird experience in the reign of Edward III and wrote up a very short version. Then, much later in life, because she thought she was going to die, she wrote the long version, which is what most of us read. That was at about the time Chaucer was writing The Canterbury Tales . She completely removes from Christianity the concept of punishment and anger, the anger of God. It’s revolutionary.” Read more...
A N Wilson recommends the best Christian Books
A N Wilson ,
Biographer
“The reason why I think it is so important is because many people think that we speak much too easily and glibly about God and the author of this book says that in order to truly know God we have to go into a cloud of unknowing…This book, for me, is very important because Christianity has this strong mystical tradition, which can often be neglected. And this is one of Christianity’s most important mystical writings.” Read more...
The best books on Christianity
Richard Harries ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
“This is Teresa’s own account of her journey. And it was written at the request of her confessor. She was already attracting a certain amount of unfriendly attention from the authorities, including the Inquisition… So Teresa’s confessor is really saying, ‘Look, get down on paper, what you think you’re doing, just in case things get difficult.’… What she’s doing in The Book of Her Life is explaining why it is that she is a reformer of the monastic life.” Read more...
The best books on Saint Teresa of Avila
Rowan Williams ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
“All the best English stuff is said so simply with no long theological words or going over the top. It’s gentle stuff. Like Pilgrim’s Progress , a book which has stuck with me throughout my life. Now that I’m over eighty, I’m reading more and more the part where Christian and Christiana are preparing themselves to go across the River of Death and get to the Celestial City, and he gives an account of all the people who are trying to go across that river and the different ways that they approach it. It’s an incredible amount of good sense and observation.” Read more...
Rabbi Lionel Blue chooses his Favourite Books
Rabbi Lionel Blue ,
Memoirist
“One of the things which four out of the five books I’ve chosen all have in common is a belief that the kind of truth which Christianity embodies was available before the coming into the world of Christ. What Dante does is take all the classical mythologies of monsters and harpies and make them into a part of the underworld in Hell, which is fascinating…He loses Virgil and Beatrice leads him on, and he has all these conversations. He meets his ancestor who appears rather grand. And he is then led even further up and even Beatrice has to abandon him and swan back into the background. Then he is led by St Bernard into the presence and he sees God. It is extraordinary. I don’t think there’s anything in world literature to compare with the last few cantos of the Paradiso as a Christian statement.I don’t think there’s anything in world literature to compare with the last few cantos of the Paradiso as a Christian statement.” Read more...
A N Wilson recommends the best Christian Books
A N Wilson ,
Biographer
“Aquinas is a Christian theologian as well as a philosopher. Certainly, a lot of what he has to say about God is based on what he takes to be divinely revealed sources such as Scripture and the teaching of the church. But, all the same, a great deal of what he has to say is based instead on purely philosophical considerations. So I would say that Aquinas is generally considered to be the greatest of thinkers who approach the question of God’s existence and nature by way of natural theology. One of the reasons that Aquinas is so important has, of course, to do with the power of his own ideas. By anyone’s accounting, he had a very powerful intellect. But another reason why Aquinas is so important has to do with the way he borrows from the past. That’s why he can be thought of as a representative thinker of the classical theist tradition.” Read more...
The best books on Arguments for the Existence of God
Edward Feser ,
Philosopher
Modern Christian writers
“Rudolf Bultmann was the greatest New Testament theologian of the 20th century. He was an exegete, a Classicist and a historian, but also a theologian. He was a professor of theology relating what he knew as a historian to what he believed as a Christian. The reason I picked him out—in a book that is now 90 years old and therefore in some ways out of date (it was written before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947)—is that he was writing after 60-odd years of people writing lots of lives of Jesus. What he is saying is, ‘That’s not the point.’ A positivistic historical picture of Jesus misses the main point about him, and misses the main point about history too. History is about an encounter with the past, it’s not just a description. It’s about our own relationship to the past, our identity. So when he was asked to write yet another historical book about Jesus, he agreed, but he thought he would try and write one which communicated some sense of why Jesus was important to him.” Read more...
The best books on Jesus
Robert Morgan ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
“Moral Man and Immoral Society is about how Christian faith impinges on the world. What is interesting about Reinhold Niebuhr is that he was hugely influential on the top swath of American political thinkers and politicians in the Democratic Party. Jimmy Carter, for instance, kept a collection of Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings by his bedside. He referred to them as his political bible. He has been one of the few Christian writers who have really been able to speak to two generations of political thinkers and he is beginning to come back into fashion again now. He was a huge influence on President Obama, for example.” Read more...
The best books on Christianity
Richard Harries ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
“This book was a very powerful book for me, because it reminded me that being a believer does not exempt me from pain. There is this false notion that, if we love God, somehow we’ll be healthy and wealthy and things will be better and easier. That’s not true.” Read more...
The best books on Simple Governance
Mike Huckabee ,
Politician
“In my view, Rowan Williams is the biggest intellectual genius of our time by quite a long way. Rowan translates from about 11 languages; anything you think you know about, he knows far more. It is really rather depressing! Some of his work is very easy – for example, some of his simple sermons. But some of his essays on theology need quite a lot of grappling with. I am assuming that my five books are for people who really want to grapple quite seriously, so there must be something of Rowan Williams. On Christian Theology is a collection of his essays from the 1980s and 90s and on a range of subjects.” Read more...
The best books on Christianity
Richard Harries ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
“It is a history of the whole of Christianity, but he has a wonderful subtitle: A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years . It takes a little bit of thinking about because you think, ‘Hang on, surely he means two thousand years?’ He doesn’t, of course, because he refers back to the Old Testament, and the history of Christianity before Christ. It’s a hugely ambitious book, but it’s just wonderfully told, and it’s full of such variety and colour, but also a tremendous amount of sympathy. He’s a very erudite, cultured writer, and I enjoyed this book very much.” Read more...
The best books on English Church Music
Andrew Gant ,
“This was a book that I read in college, and it influenced me in that I realised that faith that does not cost anything is what Bonhoeffer would call ‘cheap grace’. So much of American Christianity was cheap grace – fire insurance more than a call to true discipleship. It had a profound impact on me. Here was a person whose faith was not merely a belief system; rather, it was a way of life – to a point of even his own death. He was so committed to what was right versus what was easy that he was willing to die. I think he, and Martin Luther King Jr and others, knew that, as James says in the New Testament, faith without works is dead. That was very evident in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life.” Read more...
The best books on Simple Governance
Mike Huckabee ,
Politician
Novels by Christian authors
“He’s the most creative Biblical scholar of my generation, so he had to be on this list. The particular book I’ve chosen is amazing. Jesus never appears, it’s just the shadow of the Galilean. It’s getting at the truth of Jesus through a novel. But it’s absolutely loaded with scholarship and theological reflection. Some of the scholarship you’ll see in the footnotes. But those who know what to look for will see layers of theological reflection in there as well. It’s a wonderful book that one can go back to, and read at different levels. It’s a book I put in everyone’s hand when I get the chance.” Read more...
The best books on Jesus
Robert Morgan ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
“I think that this book, almost more than any other, certainly of books written in my lifetime, shows what is so very distinctive about it. Because it is not a set of moral commandments, it isn’t just a myth that happens to be true, it is something which encapsulates everything that’s ever happened. The extraordinary thing which he captures completely brilliantly is that Christianity is something that is universal, but it only makes sense in terms of each individual person who subscribes to it.” Read more...
A N Wilson recommends the best Christian Books
A N Wilson ,
Biographer
“Everyone knows Lewis’s Narnia books are a foundational work of the modern fantastic. But I don’t think Lewis gets enough credit for his craft as a writer. Those books are deceptively simple. Look at the way he constructed the opening of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . He puts the shadows of the war in the background, the excitement of a new house in the country in the foreground. Look at how he carefully sketches all the relationships between all four of the Pevensie children. And when he sends Lucy through the wardrobe—on page five, he doesn’t waste time—it’s like nothing else in fiction up to that point. There are no sparkles, no wondrous rhetoric, just one precisely observed sensory detail after another. There are no sparkles, no wondrous rhetoric, just one precisely observed sensory detail after another: A dead bluebottle on a windowsill; some soft coats; some cold crunchy snow; some prickly pine branches – and then you’re in Narnia. People dismiss Lewis as a Christian propagandist, but that’s a mistake. He was a novelist before he was a Christian.” Read more...
The best books on Fantasy
Lev Grossman ,
Novelist
“In a sense, it’s science fiction. But it’s laced through with a deep thread of theology. The protagonist, Meg Murray, encounters angels and she encounters an absolute evil. In this book, a deity—in the sense of absolute good—does not show themselves, but their subordinates, the messengers, the ones who help to do the will of the supreme being, are all very present. The spiritual elements appear side by side with the physics aspects in a way that you don’t often see being done either in children’s literature or in speculative fiction.” Read more...
The Best Speculative Fiction About Gods and Godlike Beings
Karen Lord ,
Novelist
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