We can’t help but agree with C.S. Lewis, who said, “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” All of us at Tennent are book lovers, and it is largely by reading that we have been shaped to know and love Christ, to engage the world’s great thinkers, to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. From time to time we would like to share a few favorite titles from our own bookshelves for your reading pleasure. Here’s a small sample of books that are fascinating, encouraging, challenging, and lively. Enjoy!
Devotional: Desiring God, by John Piper. Piper helps me to see the connection between the glory of God and our pursuit of joy in God. As he says, God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. God’s glory and my joy in him are not at odds! This book has been a constant fuel for me since I became a Christian.
Practical Theology of Suffering: Trusting God, by Jerry Bridges. I enjoy everything by Bridges! He is reformed and theologically minded, and although he has been very influenced by the Puritans, he brings it down to a level that lay people can understand. Trusting God is rich but accessible, exploring the sovereignty, goodness, and love of God in the midst of suffering—balancing sovereignty’s woodenness with the kindness of a loving Father.
Church Leadership: Wisdom in Leadership, by Craig Hamilton is the number one book on this topic that I recommend. It’s difficult to find a book on leadership that walks the tension between really practical leadership principles and sound biblical theology, but Hamilton is both pragmatic and rooted in scripture.
A Book to Understand America: Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer. Why do different parts of the United States feel like foreign cultures? Because they are. Fischer describes four colonial migrations, from four different parts of Britain and Ireland, in four different generations, for four different reasons, to four different areas in what is now the U.S. Add to them New Netherland (Greater New York), send their descendants into the West to hybridize new cultures, and you have the roiling, clashing, and vibrant diversity we have today. You’ll never look at your American ministry context—and the news—the same way, and if you aren’t an American, you’ll come to understand this strange nation better than Americans do.
A Book to Understand the New Testament: Honor, Patronage, Kinship, and Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture, by David S. de Silva. The societies of the Mediterranean—Jewish, Greek, Roman, and beyond—were woven on the frame of honor and shame, patron-client relationships, kinship ties, and sacred/common and clean/polluted distinctions. Read this book, and your black-and-white New Testament will explode into color; you’ll never read it the same way again.
A Book to Understand Church and Culture: To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, by James Davison Hunter. How do you change the world? Maybe it’s the work of individuals at the grassroots winning people to Jesus—wrong. Maybe it’s getting righteous people elected to office—wrong. Maybe it’s producing more and better art—wrong. The answer, says sociologist Hunter, is that you don’t change it—and yet that may change it. This book upends every Christian tribe’s assumptions about cultural engagement and casts an awesome vision of the church’s mission in the world.
Novel: The Secret History, by Donna Tartt. I love Donna Tartt—she writes massive meandering erudite novels of modern American life that somehow manage to be page turners at the same time (she won the Pulitzer in 2014 for The Goldfinch). This is her first book and it focuses on a group of classics majors at an elite New England liberal arts school who get a little too carried away in their romanticism and end up more (or less?) murdering one of their friends. Then their lives unravel. It is a riveting meditation on what can happen when you chase beauty divorced from truth and goodness.
Devotional/Spirituality/Christian Classic: Letters to Malcolm, by C.S. Lewis. Lewis’s little book on prayer is criminally under-read. Written near the end of his life it has all his characteristic wit, erudition, and clarity. It is structured like Screwtape Letters as a one-sided series of correspondence, which gives it a warm, relational, ad hoc feeling (you know, like prayer!). Personally, I find Lewis's vision for prayer to repeatedly speak to my theological hang ups, temperamental quirks, and spiritual needs. Lewis's vision relieves so much of my anxiety so I can just be with God.
Productivity, Self-Help: Deep Work, by Cal Newport. Cal Newport is a computer scientist at Georgetown who graduated from MIT and writes tons and tons of books on technology and productivity when he isn't busy writing papers on abstract math and coding. This book has made the most concrete difference in my day-to-day work habits of anything I've ever read. Honestly, when I discovered it in 2018 I felt overwhelmed all the time, and Cal gave me the tools to simplify and focus. I have never looked back. Every pastor/seminary student should read it and think about how they can simplify and focus their life in order to work deeper.
History: An Utterly Impartial History of Britain, or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge, by John O’Farrell. One of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in the past few years, O’Farrell’s survey is hilarious, engaging, slightly less than ‘impartial,’ well-informed, and a welcomed break from the deluge of academic publications I’ve been reading on early-modern British history. There’s nothing here that’s devotional, and it’s probably not entirely PG, but it is a great read for those who would like an entertaining overview of Britain’s rich and varied history.
Biography: A Day’s March Nearer Home: Autobiography of J. Graham Miller, edited by Iain Murray. Murray, a terrific biographer, collected sheaves of Graham Miller’s personal notes originally intended for the family, and wove them together into a smooth narrative after Miller’s passing at the age of ninety-four. Reading this on the heels of John G. Paton’s autobiography was so rewarding—a century after Paton’s dramatic missionary adventures in the New Hebrides (the fear of being eaten by cannibals was a very real danger), there was something profound about Miller's ordinary, faithful, humble ministry to those same islands that warmed my soul and has stuck with me. While most of us won’t be a John Paton, I think that many of us can be a Graham Miller.
Theology: Delighting in the Trinity, by Michael Reeves. This is a work that I’ve required all of my theology students to read since I discovered it in 2015. It is a delightful read, a lively and witty introduction to weighty theological matters with a formational and doxological aim. Reeves helps us to see the goodness of our Triune God, and the importance of trinitarian theology for all of life. If I could only own one book on the doctrine of the Trinity, this would be the one. While others may contain more content than this slim volume, not one can make my heart sing as Delighting in the Trinity does.
Biography: A Burning in My Bones, by Winn Collier. This essential authorized biography of Eugene Peterson offers unique insights into the experiences and spiritual convictions of the iconic American pastor and beloved translator of The Message. In the time of a generation-wide breakdown in trust with leaders in every sphere of society, Eugene’s quiet life of deep integrity and gospel purpose is a bright light against a dark backdrop.
Cultural Relevance: Twittering Machine, by Richard Seymour is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think.
Life Purpose: Second Mountain, by David Brooks. David Brooks, with his voracious research and fact gathering, makes a plea for commitment to four integral areas in your life in a quest for meaning, significance, and joy. Through a mid-life divorce, David was forced to re-evaluate the important things in life—the Second Mountain is his discovery through a difficult season. You may not agree with all of it, but it certainly leaves one with ideas to chew on.