Over the past few weeks I’ve shared a bit about my favorite books, what reading has taught me, and a short-list of truly “great” writers. But as I mentioned a few weeks ago, these are all merely glimpses of what is truly good in our world and beyond. So this week I want to share with you some of my own areas of interest and how I plan to delve deeper into them.
You can organize my interests (very loosely!) under three headings: Ethics, Epics, and the Ekklésia (or Church). In fleshing out how I wanted to approach these subjects, some of these books simply fell into my lap, either as gifts from family and friends, or as free or discounted eBooks available from their publishers. But most of the fifty-two works below were pointed out to me by a handful of books I read the last few years (or even months!): ~ After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre ~ Common Prayer by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove & Enuma Okoro ~ The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher ~ Early Christians Speak, Vol. 1 by Everett Ferguson ~ The Language of God by Francis Collins After Virtue is preeminent on the list for three reasons. First, reading it last year, MacIntyre reminded me just how much I still have to learn; so many of the works listed under ethics are due to his influence. But he is also one of the reasons why I want to immerse myself in epic poetry. Much like Kirk, MacIntyre points out how ancient epics informed the virtues of heroic societies, the subject and title of his tenth chapter. So while many of the epics I’ve chosen were influenced by Lewis (That Hideous Strength) and Tolkien (The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrún, The Fall of Arthur, and The Story of Kullervo), MacIntyre has given me new reasons to read in that direction. Finally, MacIntyre is also the inspiration for Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, which means that there’s not really an area I’m interested in that he hasn’t already thought and written about extensively. The next two on the list really go hand-in-hand. I used Common Prayer for my daily devotionals in 2016, and I read though The Benedict Option this year in the first week after its release. Both demonstrate the need for the modern church to reclaim something she has lost through the ages in order to transcend our politics of lust and greed. But there are also several differences between the two perspectives, CP approaching things from the Left and The BenOp from the Right (see here and here). And yet there were four books recommended by both CP and The BenOp, which seem to merit my attention: The Rule of St. Benedict; Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon; and Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community by Wendell Berry. But if I had to sum up the problems with both CP and The BenOp, it would be that they assume the wrong frame of reference for their diagnosis and prescriptions. Both try to recover the wisdom of the early church, but neither of them goes far enough back (only the fifth or sixth century). And that’s where Everett Ferguson comes in with Early Christians Speak. Ferguson combines representative quotes from the first three centuries of the church, organizes them by topic, and then discusses what this teaches us about being the church then and now. So far I’ve read about half of his monographs, and am hoping they eventually digitize his several edited works. He has also pointed me back to many other Restoration Movement writers, many of which are seen below. Of these five works, though, the one that surprises me the most is still The Language of God. Francis Collins served previously as Director of the Human Genome Project and is currently the Director of the National Institutes of Health. He’s also a committed believer who has tried for over a decade to reduce the friction between the fields of religion and science. The connection between him and some of the works below is probably fairly obvious, like the last three under ethics (although ethics is actually where I disagree with him most). But Collins also draws extensively on Lewis (whom he calls his “familiar Oxford adviser”), as well as Augustine, both of whom appear below. To illustrate how you can weave the Great Books and other good books into a course of reading, I’ve once again numbered the authors recommended in Mortimer Adler’s classic, How to Read a Book. Although each list is roughly chronological, I don’t necessarily plan on reading them that way. Books I plan on re-reading along the way have been marked with an asterisk (*). ETHICS 10. The Republic of Plato, trans and ed. Allan Bloom Plato’s Theory of Education by R.C. Lodge 11. Metaphysics, Rhetoric*, Poetics*, The Constitution of Athens, and Fragments, all attributed to Aristotle Augustine on the Christian Life by Gerald Bray 32. City of God by Augustine The Allegory of Love, Mere Christianity*, The Four Loves*, The Discarded Image, The Weight of Glory, Christian Reflections, Poems, and Present Concerns by C.S. Lewis Dependent Rational Animals by Alasdair MacIntyre Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community by Wendell Berry Embracing Creation by John Mark Hicks, Bobby Valentine & Mark Wilson The Faithful Creator by Ron Highfield Reconciling the Bible and Science by Kirk Blackard & Lynn Mitchell EPICS Beowulf*, trans. Seamus Heaney (alongside Tolkien’s commentary) 33. The Song of Roland 35. The Story of Burnt Njal The Saga of the Volsungs The Prose (or Elder) Edda The Poetic Edda The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrún* by J.R.R. Tolkien The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth Kalevala, ed. Elias Lönnrot Early Irish Myths and Sagas by Jeffrey Gantz The Mabinogion Beren and Lúthien by J.R.R. Tolkien (ed. Christopher Tolkien, forthcoming June 2017) The Lord of the Rings* by J.R.R. Tolkien EKKLÉSIA The Backgrounds of Early Christianity, Inheriting Wisdom, The Early Church and Today (Vol. 2), The Early Church at Work and Worship (Vols. 2 & 3), and Gregory of Nyssa: The Life of Moses by Everett Ferguson The Rule of St. Benedict Life Together and Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas & William Willimon Reviving the Ancient Faith and Reclaiming a Heritage by Richard T. Hughes The Cruciform Church by C. Leonard Allen The Crux of the Matter and Will the Cycle Be Unbroken, by Douglas A. Foster et al. Why They Left by Flavil R. Yeakley Why We Stayed, ed. Benjamin J. Williams
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Last week we discussed how reading the Great Books fosters the growth of “the moral imagination.” This week, we take a look at what I’ve come to call a glance at the Great Books, a list of forty-eight great authors and their best known works. The authors and works listed below are those recommended by all three of the reading lists I consulted—Adler’s How to Read a Book, Bloom’s The Western Canon, and Fadiman and Major’s The New Lifetime Reading Plan--organized chronologically and numbered by Adler. For the sake of convenience, I’ve divided these works into the conventional categories of Fiction and Nonfiction. Some of these writers belong in both categories, but to avoid redundancies I have included each author only on the list where I felt most readers would look for them. We spoke last week mainly about Nonfiction: philosophy, the natural sciences, foreign languages, and civics. But this week I’d like to preface the list with some brief thoughts on Fiction. The list starts with Fiction for two reasons. On one hand, this corresponds closely with most people’s actual reading experience. As children we (hopefully!) began reading fiction for fun, and then later on shifted to reading for learning. But in an even deeper way Fiction stands first because, as Russell Kirk once said, “Fiction is truer than fact.” As he continues: I mean that in great fiction we obtain the distilled wisdom of men of genius, understandings of human nature which we could attain—if at all—unaided by books, only at the end of life, after numberless painful experiences. I began to read Sir Walter Scott when I was twelve or thirteen; and I think I learnt from the Waverley novels, and from Shakespeare, more of the varieties of character than ever I have got since from the manuals of psychology. And Fiction’s edifying role is not limited to the social sciences. “In certain ways, the great novel and the great poem can teach more of norms than can philosophy and theology.” Think for a moment of the Bible: God did not reveal himself to mankind merely through lengthy discourses (although there is much of that, about 24 of the 66 canonical books) but also in poetry (17 books) and narrative (25 books). In other words, the One who made us and knows us best reveals himself in a way that is not only good and true, but beautiful (Ecc 12:10). In the same way, the Great Books’ blend of poetry, prose, and discourse reflects the image of the Creator and His creation. So while a well-rounded education will certainly include some good, no-nonsense discourse, “miscellaneous browsing in the realm of fiction rarely does mischief,” and often does far more.
So as you take a glance at these great books, remember not to hold them as an end-all-be-all, but as a glimpse of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Instead, find something that interests you and dig in, let it shape how you see the world around you, and let it launch you onto other literary endeavors (whether those works made the list or not!) Lord willing, next week we’ll continue with quick looks at some of my own areas of interest: ethics, epics, and the Christian ekklesia. FICTION 1. The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer 3. The Oresteia by Aeschylus 4. The Theban Plays by Sophocles 6. The Baccae, Hippolytus, and Medea by Euripides 9. The Birds and The Clouds by Aristophanes 18. The Aeneid by Virgil 37. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri 38. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer 45. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais 49. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes 52. The Poetry and Plays of William Shakespeare 58. Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, and the Sonnets of John Milton 67. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe 68. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift 78. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne 86. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 89. The Poems of William Wordsworth 90. Biographia Literaria, Kubla Khan, and Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 91. Pride and Prejudice and Emma by Jane Austen 93. The Red and the Black by Stendhal 99. Pére Goriot and Eugenie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac 101. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne 105. The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, and Hard Times by Charles Dickens 109. Middlemarch by George Eliot 110. Moby Dick by Herman Melville 111. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky 112. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert 113. Hedda Gabler by Henrick Ibsen 114. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 115. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain 117. The Ambassadors by Henry James NONFICTION 5. The Histories by Herodotus 7. History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides 10. The Dialogues of Plato 11. The Nicomachean Ethics and Poetics by Aristotle 17. On the Nature of Things by Lucretius 32. Confessions by Augustine 40. The Prince by Niccoló Machiavelli 47. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne 56. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes 60. The Pensées of Blaise Pascal 61. The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison (which I plan to read chronologically alongside the Anti-Federalist Papers) 73. Candide and Letters on the English by Voltaire 82. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. by James Boswell 103. On Liberty by John Stuart Mill 107. Civil Disobedience and Walden by Henry David Thoreau 116. Pragmatism by William James 118. Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Wilhelm Neitzsche Works Cited ~ Adler, Mortimer J. & Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. New York: Touchstone, 1972. Print. ~ Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Riverhead, 1994. Print. ~ Fadiman, Clifton & John S. Major. The New Lifetime Reading Plan. 4th Ed. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999. Print. ~ Kirk, Russell. “The Moral Imagination.” The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. Web. 12 Apr. 2015. |
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