Thursday, January 31, 2008

Books - CT's 100 Great Books of the 20th Century

Here is a "required" reading list for Christians, according to the editors, staff, and contributors to Christianity Today magazine. These are books that had the most significant impact on Christian theology, practice, and devotion in the 20th century. Many were, and are, controversial. Some were not written by Christians but still had a dramatic influence on Christian perception of faith and society.

I've read seven of them over the years, started three, and own ten others, so I'd best get crackin'.

I've provided Amazon links for the Top 10. The Other 90 are in the first comment.

THE TOP 10

1. C. S. Lewis - Mere Christianity
"The best case for the essentials of orthodox Christianity in print." - David S. Dockery

2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer - The Cost of Discipleship
"Leaves you wondering why you ever thought complacency or compromise in the Christian life was an option." - Mark Buchanan

3. Karl Barth - Church Dogmatics
"Opened a new era in theology in which the Bible, Christ, and saving grace were taken seriously once more." - J. I. Packer

4. J. R. R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
"A classic for children from 9 to 90. Bears constant re-reading." - J. I. Packer

5. John Howard Yoder - The Politics of Jesus
"Some 30 years after this book was published, the church has found itself culturally in a more marginal position, and this book is making wider and wider sense." - Rodney Clapp

6. G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy
"A rhetorically inventive exposition of the coherence of Christian truth." - David Neff

7. Thomas Merton - The Seven Storey Mountain
"A painfully candid story of one Christian soul's walk with grace and struggle, it has become the mark against which all other spiritual autobiographies must be measured." - Phyllis Tickle

8. Richard Foster - Celebration of Discipline
"After Foster finishes each spiritual discipline, you not only know what it is, why it's important, and how to do it—you want to do it." - Mark Buchanan

9. Oswald Chambers - My Utmost for His Highest
"A treasury of daily devotional readings that has fed the souls of millions of Christians in the twentieth century. Future generations of Christians must continue to draw from this treasury." - Richard J. Mouw

10. Reinhold Niebuhr - Moral Man and Immoral Society
"Introduced a breathtakingly insightful, shrewd, and cunning realism about human sin, especially in its social expressions,
rooted in biblical theology and a penetrating appraisal of the dark era into which the Western world had entered." - David P. Gushee

The other 90 are listed in Comments.

1 comment:

Sharp said...

THE OTHER 90
in alphabetical order by author

Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart

Alcoholics Anonymous
(The Big Book of A.A.)


Roland Bainton
Here I Stand

Karl Barth
The Epistle to the Romans

Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death

Robert N. Bellah, et al
Habits of the Heart

Georges Bernanos
The Diary of a Country Priest

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Letters and Papers from Prison

David Bosch
Transforming Mission

Walter Brueggemann
The Prophetic Imagination

Emil Brunner
Truth as Encounter

Albert Camus
The Plague

Edward John Carnell
The Case for Orthodox Christianity

Willa Cather
Death Comes for the Archbishop

Dorothy Day
The Long Loneliness

Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Documents of Vatican II

W. E. B. Dubois
The Souls of Black Folk

T. S. Eliot
Four Quartets

Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man

Jacques Ellul
The Technological Society

Shusaku Endo
Silence

Anne Frank
The Diary of Anne Frank

Victor Frankl
Man's Search for Meaning

Sigmund Freud
Civilization and Its Discontents
The Fundamentals

Langdon Gilkey
Shantung Compound

Carol Gilligan
In a Different Voice

Graham Greene
The Power and the Glory

John Howard Griffin
Black Like Me

Gustavo Gutiérrez
A Theology of Liberation

Philip Paul Hallie
Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed

Stanley Hauerwas
A Community of Character

Václav Havel
Living in Truth

Richard Hays
The Moral Vision of the New Testament

Carl F. H. Henry
God, Revelation, and Authority (six volumes)

John R. Hersey
Hiroshima

Abraham Heschel
The Prophets

Aldous Huxley
Brave New World

William James
The Varieties of Religious Experience

Franz Kafka
The Trial

Martin Luther King, Jr.
A Testament of Hope

Thomas S. Kuhn
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird

Aldo Leopold
A Sand County Almanac

C. S. Lewis
The Chronicles of Narnia (especially The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)
The Screwtape Letters

J. Gresham Machen
Christianity and Liberalism

Alasdair C. MacIntyre
After Virtue

Malcolm X and Alex Haley
The Autobiography of Malcolm X

George M. Marsden
Fundamentalism and American Culture

FranÇois Mauriac
Viper's Tangle

Jürgen Moltmann
The Crucified God

Richard John Neuhaus
The Naked Public Square

Lesslie Newbigin
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

Reinhold Niebuhr
The Nature and Destiny of Man (two volumes)

H. Richard Niebuhr
Christ and Culture

Kathleen Norris
The Cloister Walk

Henri J. M. Nouwen
The Wounded Healer

Anders Nygren
Agape and Eros

Elizabeth O'Connor
Journey Inward, Journey Outward

Flannery O'Connor
A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

Rudolf Otto
The Idea of the Holy

J. I. Packer
Knowing God

Alan Paton
Cry, the Beloved Country

Jaroslav Pelikan
Jesus Through the Centuries

Josef Pieper
The Four Cardinal Virtues

Michael Polanyi
Personal Knowledge

Chaim Potok
The Chosen

Walter Rauschenbusch
Christianity and the Social Crisis

Dorothy L. Sayers
The Mind of the Maker

Albert Schweitzer
The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Nevil Shute
On the Beach

Ronald J. Sider
Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

John R. W. Stott
Basic Christianity

Paul Tournier
The Meaning of Persons

A. W. Tozer
The Pursuit of God

Barbara Tuchman
The Guns of August

Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism

Miroslav Volf
Exclusion and Embrace

Gerhard von Rad
Old Testament Theology

Andrew F. Walls
The Missionary Movement in Christian History

Max Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Simone Weil
Waiting for God

Elie Wiesel
Night

Charles Williams
Descent into Hell

Walter Wink
Engaging the Powers

Philip Yancey
The Jesus I Never Knew