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My Current Favorites
Five books, movies, or songs influencing me nowHammer of God
WHY I LIKE IT
Three generations of Lutheran clergy in a Swedish village -- one God who humbles hearts and saves souls. Twice was brought to tears. Leland Ryken wrote a review for TGC and called it a Christian classic. I certainly wish Augsburg Fortress would rethink the format and cover -- it feels like a self-published book.
Puritan Portraits: J. I. Packer on Selected Classic Pastors and Pastoral Classics
WHY I LIKE IT
This is the current Packer book I'm reading, and is a collection of introductions he wrote about various Puritan figures. Packer gives us profiles of John Flavel, Thomas Boston, John Bunyan, Matthew Henry, Henry Scougal, John Owen and Stephen Charnock and two closer portraits of William Perkins and Richard Baxter. The Packer book I refer to the most is probably his Keep in Step With the Spirit or Concise Theology.
How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem
WHY I LIKE IT
I appreciate Dreher's writing in general. I appeciate Dreher's approach to apply the truths in Dante's Divine Comedy to his own situation. I can't help but wonder, though, if this book might make his family situation even more difficult to navigate.
Gaining By Losing: Why the Future Belongs to Churches that Send
WHY I LIKE IT
I'm enjoying Greear writing thus far, and appreciate the call to train up and send out church planting teams - and sending out a church's best people to see kingdom communities grow.
My Essentials
My all-time favorite books, movies and musicJohn Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition: Between the Conversions of Wesley and Wilberforce
The Abolition of Man
WHY I LIKE IT
This and The Discarded Image are probably the two of Lewis's more academic works that I appreciate the most. This is a wholesale and trenchant critique of modern approaches to education. Two phrases that stick with me are "the head rules the belly through the chest" and, "for the ancients, the chief goal was conforming the soul to reality". The appendix on the Tao is a fascinating compendium.
The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (Background: Essential Texts for the Conservative Mind)
WHY I LIKE IT
I don't claim to fully understand Rieff, but the distinction that has stuck with me from reading this carefully with a close friend years ago is the therapeutic transition from "commitment therapy" to "remissive therapy" that has happened in the twentieth century. For pastors, counselors and psychologists tempted to shy away from an accountability role, directive therapy, and drawn toward exclusively "client-directed" approaches, reading this book will help you at least trace the very modern lineage of your approach.
After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition
WHY I LIKE IT
While critics often dismiss the virtue uniformity of the late medieval moral world that McIntyre sees as being perverted by post-enlightenment ethics, the cogency of McIntyre's argument is extremely satisfying. The concluding lines about waiting for another, albeit very different, St. Benedict is most often quoted, but the opening "Disquieting Suggestion" is such an elegantly drawn analogy that it remains one of the passages I reflect on the most.