Presidential Picks
Some All-Time Favorite Books
C.S. Lewis, everything, but especially Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, Till We Have Faces, The Chronicles of Narnia.
I hate to be cliché, but Lewis really is the finest Christian writer since the canonical ones.
Mortimer Adler, everything, but especially How to Read a Book and How to Speak, How to Listen.
But then again, isn't How to Read a Book everyone's favorite?
Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life.
The manliest book I ever read. Unamuno's embrace of faith within the context of haunting doubt and his desperate affirmation of the afterlife have saved me from much theological error. Not light reading!
Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge.
Lays out the four essential tasks of leadership more eloquently than anything else I've read.
James MacGregor Burns, Leadership.
Burns' theory of transformational leadership is incredibly inspiring and uplifting.
Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
The best thing written yet on globalization, opening up a brand new view of the world for me. See also the sequel, The World is Flat.
Melvin Hodges, The Indigenous Church.
Every time I ever disobeyed Hodges as a missionary, I-and my work-paid the price.
Roland Allen, Missionary Methods: St. Paul's or Ours.
Still the best thing ever written on missions.
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized.
Awoke me from my "dogmatic slumber" about the unmixed dignity of my status as a missionary.
Jim Collins, Good to Great.
Hip, revealing, and based on impressive empirical research, it lays out the true differences between good and great organizations. Lord, give us Level 5 leaders!
James Fowler, Stages of Faith.
The most helpful piece of theory on spiritual growth I ever read. Takes the life cycle seriously and explains spiritual growth in credible terms, though from a liberal Christian perspective I wouldn't fully share.
Howard Gardner, Leading Minds.
A cognitive psychology of leadership that is really fantastic.
J. Edwin Orr, Campus Aflame.
A truly cool history of revival on American college campuses.
Frederic Rudolph, The American College and University: A History.
The standard volume on American higher education history. Wonderfully written about my favorite topic.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind.
Stuffy, ridiculous, liberal, conservative, right, wrong, and utterly engaging.
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time.
Made me truly lament my mathematical deficiencies and fall in love with science for the first time.
Recent Readings Worth Looking At
D. Michael Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite.
Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation.
One of the finest theological books of the last half century written by a Croatian Pentecostal who is a professor at Yale Divinity School, perhaps the leading young theologian in the world. See also Volf's Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work.
Philip Jenkins, God's Continent.
latest part of a de facto trilogy along with The Next Christendom and The Bible in the Global South
Chin-Ning Chu, The Asian Mind Game: A Westerner's Survival Manual.
Fascinating book on Asian business culture, focusing on the "36 Strategies of War" of the ancient General Sun Tzu. It turns any facile talk of "multiculturalism" into a whole new discussion.
T.R. Reid, Confucius Lives Next Door.
I just recently skimmed it, and will add it to my list to read carefully soon. Reid's a great writer and cultural analyst, and in this book he explores how Confucianism continues to influence Asian culture.
T.R. Reid, The United States of Europe.
Whoa! Europe's a real player in today's economy. Essential foreign affairs reading, along with Jeremy Rifkin's The European Dream. Good on understanding the competition between Boeing and Airbus.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing.
An exciting report on Christianity in China and our possible future together.
Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within.
The book is overly biased against Muslims, written by an enraged American living in Norway, but presents a powerful argument for a scary future in Europe.
Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present.
What a revelation about America's history with Islam. I didn't actually read this one, but listened to an hour and a half podcast in which the author summarized the book. Wow.
Steven Sample, The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership.
Cool, postmodern, and totally relevant to my life these days.
C.J. Box, Open Season.
This book is the first of a series of detective/mystery novels that involves a Wyoming game warden who runs into difficulties in the field that are very up to date, and it is a very entertaining look into the culture of the rural Northwest. I've read all six of them since July.