The excellent website RelevantMagazine.com recently posted a 2011 Reading Guide, with some excellent choices of must-read books for the year ahead.
We have included a few of their recommendations for your benefit below:
“We are living, as Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley has said, in the “age of memoir.” If anything, memoirs seem to be even more popular in Christian publishing than in the mainstream (maybe because we prize personal testimonies), and each year brings one or two excellent spiritual memoirs that refresh the genre, and sometimes even transcend it. “Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me” (Thomas Nelson), by Ian Morgan Cron, is one of those, as is Craig Goodwin’s “Year of Plenty” (Sparkhouse Press). Cron tells the incredible story of learning at age 16 that his stockbroker father was working for the CIA, of his father’s depression and alcoholism, his mother’s heroic efforts to save the family and Cron’s own journey from addiction to sobriety. This is a tale shot through with grace, a parable of the power of forgiveness and a vivid reminder that “love stoops.”
Craig Goodwin’s book recounts the year his family in suburban Spokane lived by four simple but radical rules: buy local, buy used, homegrown and homemade. Goodwin and his wife are Presbyterian pastors, and what sets this book apart from other “yearlong experiment” books is that it brings a deeper level of Christian engagement to the “growing movements that rebel against the consumption status quo and seek to craft a more holistic and sustainable way of living.” As Eugene Peterson writes in his foreword to the book, Year of Plenty is “a convincing witness to the sanctity of the everyday, the ordinary … which is to say, Jesus in our neighborhood.”
Let’s say you were born before 1985. You remember the world before the ubiquity of cell phones and the Internet, when you weren’t always instantly accessible and neither was the world’s store of information. At first the new technologies were cool, but the novelty has worn off (or rather, there is always something new to buy) and you are starting to feel overwhelmed by your inbox and the smart phone you just got or that you want to get or that you want to throw into the river. There has been a slew of recent books that document what these technologies are doing to our brains and to our relationships, and now Tim Challies, author and blogger, has written “The Next Story: Life and Faith After the Digital Explosion” (Zondervan), a valuable book examining the digital revolution from a faith perspective. For better or worse, these things are here, probably to stay, and Challies’ book will help you prayerfully consider how to “live in this new reality with character, virtue and wisdom” while fulfilling your God-given calling and purpose.
Americans are a first-half-of-life type of folk, which author and Franciscan priest Richard Rohr defines in “Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life” (Jossey-Bass) as the time when we establish “an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, security and building a proper platform” for our lives. These are necessary, worthy pursuits; to use a Rohr metaphor, they form the vessel of our lives. But there is a second half to life that we often try to avoid. This further journey involves times of loss and failure, falling and suffering, which fill up our vessel in the richest sense of the word: a life without them is empty and deprived of meaning. Calling on works of theology, psychology and mythology, Rohr explores the paradoxes of Christianity that characterize life’s second half: that wisdom is found in the foolish and that life can only be gained when we choose to let it go.”
You can read the full list of recommended books on www.relevantmagazine.com.
(Please note you cannot directly click that link, but will need to input it separately into your phone browser).