We hope you had a wonderful Christmas holiday with family nearby and gifts exchanged liberally. Many of us had wish lists filled with books, ready now to dive into a few good reads for the upcoming year. If you have not already set yourself up with something new to read, here are a few books we found particularly interesting over the past few months.
Below, you will find reading suggestions from our group that come from a wide range of disciplines and topics. We think these selections will be great for personal and family reading. Most of all, we think they will broaden your understanding of God’s creation and His work in it because they have had that result in our lives. Please leave us your favorite reads in the comment section.
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William H. Armstrong, Sounder (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 116 pages.
Sounder is a Newberry winner that tells the story of an African-American boy and his dog. It is a rich tale that explores themes relating to poverty, prison, despair, and education. Unlike many of today’s stories, this one engages difficult topics in a manner that is appropriately nuanced, heartwarming, and hopeful.
—Recommended by Matthew Steven Bracey
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Mark Clifton, Reclaiming Glory: Revitalizing Dying Churches (Brentwood, TN: B&H, 2023), 192 pages.
Hundreds of evangelical churches, including several Free Will Baptist churches, close their doors every year in the United States. Many that survive are just barely hanging on. Some have suggested that dying churches should be left to meet their end, that planting new churches ought to be where denominations and pastors put their resources. However, Mark Clifton, a Southern Baptist pastor and former church planter, began to have serious reservations about this mentality when he pondered the question: “What about a dying church brings glory to God?” He concluded, “Nothing about a dying church gives glory to God. Strategically, it may make more sense to start something down the street. But it seemed that allowing that church to die would bring dishonor and disrepute on the name of Jesus within that community, certainly not glory and honor” (11). As such, Clifton has devoted himself to helping revitalize (or replant) local churches for the glory of God. In Reclaiming Glory, he draws from decades of personal experience to explain how others can take part in this mission. Every pastor would benefit from Clifton’s insights.
—Recommended by Joshua R. Colson
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Jamie Dunlop, Love the Ones Who Drive You Crazy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023), 176 pages.
In the Gospels, Jesus clearly demands that His disciples love one another. He even says that the world would know His disciples by their love for one another. However, if you have been in church for any length of time, you know that some disciples are easier to love than others. The difficulty of loving some disciples—ones with whom we have personality clashes, political disagreements, or any other number of differences—does not detract from Jesus’ command, though. Moreover, as Dunlop argues in this book, “easy love rarely shows off gospel power” anyway. Instead, “unity in Christ despite our differences is a primary way God intends to show off his goodness and glory” (6). In this eminently readable book, Dunlop develops a practical theology to help disciples achieve a difficult love that reveals gospel power and God’s glory. The book is suitable for any Christian to pick up and read, but I recommend the book especially to pastors because it will help them love their people well and teach their people to love each other well.
—Recommended by Joshua R. Colson
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Justin Whitmel Earley, Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2021), 226 pages.
Justin Earley’s book on parenting and family life, Habits of the Household, is encouraging, relatable, and practicable. His constant refrain, “Our habits won’t change God’s love for us, but God’s love for us can and should change our habits” (196), is refracted through ten different aspects of family life where he examines the default habits that operate in our families and gives practical help about replacing those habits with liturgies of grace. His chapters on waking, mealtime, and bedtime, among others, are packed with ideas for reigning in the chaos of these moments—not so that we can be in control but so that we can order our family life after the pattern of the gospel. His chapters on work and play gave me a wonderful new perspective on two parts of family life I have not often seen addressed in other parenting books. Because Earley is so open about the sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious failures of his own family (of four boys), his corrective practices feel like a comfort and not a reprimand. I highly recommend it to parents needing a refreshed vision of what family life can look like in light of the Good News.
—Recommended by Rebekah Zuñiga
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Gregory E. Ganssle, Our Deepest Desires: How the Christian Story Fulfills Human Aspirations (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017), 160 pages.
Apologetic books are myriad. There is no shortage of books from various “schools” of apologetics promising to offer answers to life’s inescapable questions. Sometimes these come in the form of evidences or arguments, other times, in evaluating presuppositions. Gregory Ganssle offers a helpful book that taps into our existential longings. A quick disclaimer: I am hesitant to endorse an approach that is too existential. If a book speaks only about longings and never appeals to propositional truth, I think it has an unbalanced approach. Ganssle avoids this danger. He focuses heavily on human desire while also pointing his readers to the truth of Scripture. The book reminded me of C. S. Lewis’s concept of sensucht and Augustine’s articulation of disordered desires. Done rightly, as I think Ganssle has done, this approach is very compelling. For a refreshing approach to apologetics with historical precedence, I recommend Our Deepest Desires.
—Recommended by Christopher Talbot
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Carrie Gress, The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us (Washington D. C.: Regnery, 2023), 256 pages.
In this wonderful introductory history of feminism, Carrie Gress argues that the seeds of twentieth-century feminism (second, third, and fourth wave feminism) are present in the work of the earliest feminists of the nineteenth century. Specifically, she shows that beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter Mary Shelley, and her son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley, feminists were committed to practicing free love, smashing the patriarchy, and embracing the occult and Spiritism over Christianity. Moreover, building on her work in her previous book, The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity, she shows how twentieth-century feminists like Gloria Steinem intentionally and carefully used the media to refashion our concept of womanhood and femininity to exclude chastity and motherhood.
I was particularly excited to find Gress’ work because in conservative Christian circles twentieth-century feminism is often criticized for its radicalism, but nineteenth-century feminism is celebrated. However, while studying history in graduate school, I read several works by feminists on nineteenth-century feminism that led me to suspect we were missing something in the conservative narrative. The women I was reading about, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony, were much more radical than anyone was admitting. Gress has done a wonderful job bringing these truths to light in The End of Woman. This book is excellent reading for all, but I think it is especially important for young women trying to realize what biblical womanhood looks like in a culture that has a hard time even knowing what a woman is.
—Recommended by Phillip T. Morgan
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Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (1930; repr., New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1943), 258 pages.
I first came across Edith Hamilton’s writing a few years ago. An erudite early twentieth-century scholar, she wrote numerous books about the ancient world. Her most famous book, The Greek Way, earned her numerous awards when she first published it in 1930. This book explores ancient Greek culture and history by examining the thought of Greek authors, philosophers, and playwrights. In a recent reread, I was struck by the prescience of the problems the ancient Greeks faced. Whether they were attempting to understand the complexities of human society and justice or pining for a return to virtue, they have thought deeply about the issues we still face and offer interesting insights for today. Even though nearly a century has passed since Hamilton wrote this book, it remains fresh and informative.
—Recommended by Phillip T. Morgan
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Michael A. G. Haykin, Amidst Us Our Belovèd Stands: Recovering the Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2022), 153 pages.
It is commonly assumed that all Baptists are, and have always been, memorialists with respect to the Lord’s Supper. Michael Haykin’s collection of essays helps correct this misguided assumption. He does so by demonstrating that key English Baptists in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries went beyond bare memorialist views to embrace what is often referred to as John Calvin’s view of the Supper, or the “spiritual presence” view. Haykin almost exclusively explores the writings of English Calvinist Baptists (Benjamin Keach, Hercules Collins, William Kiffin, Andrew Fuller, and Anne Dutton, among others), though I could make a similar point with respect to some English General Baptists.
Haykin also reviews debates between figures like John Bunyan and William Kiffin on the relationship between baptism and the Lord’s Supper, particularly open versus closed communion and Bunyan’s defense of open membership. Let me mention a couple of arguments in the book that I found fascinating. Perhaps one of Haykin’s most striking arguments is that in the twentieth century, the altar call undermined a more robust view of baptism and the Supper. Haykin argues that “baptism was the place where Christians publicly made the ‘good confession’ (1 Timothy 6:12–13 CSB) and the Lord’s Supper the place where that confession was renewed on a regular basis” (124). Another intriguing argument is that the Evangelical Revival “diluted” the “eucharistic spirituality” of the Baptists “in the push to make churches primarily centers of evangelism” (107). At first glance, these appear to be arguments about history, but I am convinced they have contemporary importance.
Regardless of one’s views on baptism and the Supper, Baptists should give greater thought to their theology of the ordinances and how they relate to their ecclesiology. Amidst Us Our Belovèd Stands helps the reader do just that.
—Recommended by Jesse Owens
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Derek C. Schuurman, Shaping a Digital World: Faith, Culture and Computer Technology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013), 138 pages.
Many of the best books about technology and culture seem to be written by non-Christians like Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, and Sherry Turkle. Unfortunately, many Christian authors seem not to have provided as robust an evaluation of technology’s formative and comprehensive impact on culture. They seek to utilize a Christian worldview, but often settle for a baptized kind of pragmatism when it comes to various technologies. For these reasons, I have had my eye out for a good book that had the cultural and ecological nuance of someone like Postman with a robust Christian worldview. Derek Schuurman offers exactly that. Following a biblical theology framework, Schuurman understands both the theological and technological worlds well. In doing so, he avoids the extremes of Ludditism and technological optimism. I strongly recommend this volume for those interested in this ever-pressing area of culture. Schuurman is a clear guide to help understand technology, culture, and one’s Christian worldview better.
—Recommended by Christopher Talbot
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Brandon D. Smith, Taught by God: Ancient Hermeneutics for the Modern Church (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2024), 194 pages.
There is a tendency to assume that early church and medieval theologians were wholly given over to an allegorical interpretation of Scripture until the Reformers saved the day. To be sure, you can find elaborate allegorical interpretations in these traditions. But is there something valuable in the interpretive “sensibilities” of premodern exegetes? Absolutely. Those same sensibilities can also be found in the Reformers and even the early Baptists.
In this wonderful, concise book, Brandon D. Smith identifies three hermeneutical “sensibilities” in premodern exegetes worth retrieving. First, premodern exegetes were concerned with “the way the words go” or the literal sense of the text, derived from the literary and historical context of a passage. Second, premodern exegetes affirmed the “theological and Christological unity of Scripture,” believing in the divine authorship of Scripture and its redemptive narrative (65). Consequently, all of Scripture points to the triune God’s redemptive work in Christ which creates a theological unity across the canon. This is the interpretive “key” to Scripture and is governed by the literal sense (69).
Third, premodern exegetes believed the intended purpose of Scripture was to create “personal and ecclesial communion with God” (87). The intended end of Scripture is moral transformation and communion with God for the individual believer and the church. We might call this the “application” of the biblical text. Yet Smith argues that for premodern exegetes, the text is only rightly applied when we have considered the first two sensibilities—the literal sense of the text and how the text points to the Triune God’s redemptive work through the Son and Spirit. Smith closes this excellent book with four demonstrations of how we might retrieve this premodern exegetical method.
We desperately need to recover good, biblical hermeneutics that draw on the best interpretive methods of the Christian tradition. In Taught by God, Smith gives us an accessible guidebook on how to do so.
—Recommended by Jesse Owens
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Eric K. Thomsen, To Honor Our Heritage: A Guide to Preserving Local Church History (Nashville, TN: Randall House, 2023), 153 pages.
I am happy to recommend my friend Eric Thomsen’s book on how to write history. Although it is written with church history in mind, the principles he establishes could apply to other forms of history, too. Thomsen reviews the reasons why we should be concerned with history and how to research, interview, write, design, and edit. What makes this volume particularly helpful is how accessible it is. Thomsen writes it as an introduction so that people without a background in history can benefit from it. So, if you are interested in history, and especially if you are interested in church history, I recommend this book.
—Recommended by Matthew Steven Bracey
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Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2023), 193 pages.
I am on a quest to understand how to read literature poetically, with an eye to images, symbols, and metaphors as keys to meaning in stories. I require many aides on this quest. Wilson has been one. Her book attempts to answer many questions for Christian readers in a few short chapters, and for that reason it is a good starting off place, not getting too bogged down with any one concept. Wilson writes about why Christians would want to read anything besides the Bible, what the purpose of literature is, how virtue relates to reading, and how to approach texts with multiple layers of meaning (such as the Scriptures). She breaks up the format of her book with chapters called “bookmarks” where the reader can spend time examining the life of a great Christian reader/writer (such as Augustine of Hippo or Dorothy Sayers) to see the ideas of Wilson’s book incarnated. With its hearty (but not overwhelming) booklist and FAQ appendices, this book would be a wonderful resource for those who, like me, are starting out on a journey to read great literature with new eyes.
—Recommended by Rebekah Zuñiga
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