A Free Book + The Christmas Book List
Earn a free book and check out our favorites from this year.
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Here’s how it works:
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Then we’ll send you that book gratis.
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Now on to the book list.
The Three Things Christmas Book List
These are some of our favorite books we’ve read this year. Phillip’s list features books released this year or late in 2020. Andy’s list stretches a bit further back.
If you have any favorites you’d like to add to the list, leave them in the comments section. We hope these lists help you find something worthwhile for your own Christmas lists or for the readers in your life.
1. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman
Our culture is confusing. But this book, to quote one reviewer, “takes you to the summit of a great height, from whose vantage the many wandering roads, woods, streams, farms, and hills below, a seeming confusion of the arbitrary and happenstance, resolve themselves into order, so that you see not only what your guide points out to you, but plenty of other things as well, and not individually, but in all their many and often unexpected relationships.”
It’s all true. Read it — or listen to Trueman teach through it — and the world might make a bit more sense.
2. Alexandria by Paul Kingsnorth
Rise and Triumph is a page-turning survey of how we arrived at our current moment, but this novel envisions the same culture almost a millennium into the future. The seas have risen and most of humanity has vanished from the planet. Where have they gone, and why? The answer threatens the existence of a small religious order whose numbers are dwindling.
I can’t stop thinking about this story and Zuckerberg’s Metaverse makes me wonder if we’re closer to Alexandria than we think.
3. God of All Things: Rediscovering the Sacred in an Everyday World by Andrew Wilson
Sometimes it seems like devotional books exist to make the Bible dry, to distill the living word into a manageable instruction manual. People think they want this, but is it really good for them? A book like God of All Things shows us what we’re missing by checking our imaginations at the door. Theology is more than facts and principles. “Everything in creation has theological implications,” Wilson writes, “and one of the joys of being human is figuring out what they are.” Let Wilson tutor you in that joy as he shows you what water and wind, sea and salt, livestock and light reveal about God. It’s not a devotional book, but with thirty energetic six-page chapters, it fits the bill.
4. Paul and the Power of Grace by John Barclay
The grace of God is a gift. But what is a gift? Pick up this book and you’ll find out how our modern concept of a one-way gift is alien to the Bible. Grace is a gift that draws people into relationship with God. And in the giving, God has subverted all human expectation, extending his grace without regard to the worth of recipients.
Barclay cuts through a host of thorny debates in biblical interpretation to hand his readers the best introduction to Paul’s theology I have read. And it’s only 160 pages! Read it and you might just rediscover the gospel.
5. Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford
London, 1944. A German bomb detonates, killing five children in the fictional borough of Bexford. But what if the dust particles reassembled and each child had lived? “Come, other chances. Come, unsounded deep. Come, undivided light. Come, dust.” Light Perpetual joins the victims in fifteen-year increments through the twentieth century. It is unsettling in moments, but Spufford’s ability to show readers the full scope of five lives in 300 pages is mesmerising and profoundly poignant. Stick with it to the end; you won’t be sorry.
1. After Doubt by A. J. Swoboda
If you know someone deconstructing their faith (or are that person), buy this book. It is Swoboda’s take on a way to “doubt your faith without walking away from it.” It is the best book on the topic I have yet found.
2. Christianity For Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensees Edited, Outlined, and Explained by Peter Kreeft
Blaise Pascal was a genius. He wrote one of the best books about Christianity that has ever been written—the catch is that it was never finished. After his death, Pascal’s notes were collected as The Pensees. Peter Kreeft has created a guide and commentary to the best of the Pensees and it is filled with treasures. I found I had to read it with a journal at hand to write down both Pascal and Kreeft’s insights to keep them with me after I closed the book.
3. Reading Backwards by Richard Hays
Many of the Bible’s richest meanings are tucked away in its own internal connections and references. The books of Scripture are like a room full of people who know each other well having one long conversation. You can’t just jump in, listen for a minute, and walk away thinking you know what they were talking about. You will miss most of the back story and inside references. You have to listen to their conversations and get to know them like you would get to know a friend. Richard Hays has written a book about the internal conversations the Bible is having and it is a gem. Read it.
4. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion by Jonathan Haidt
We live in polarized times. It seems like everything is getting more intense in different directions these days. We live in a minefield and we are getting better at dancing around our differences to keep the mines from exploding. But is this how society should work? Jonathan Haidt has a diagnosis of our cultural moment and it just might help us dig up some of our culture’s unexploded ordance and defuse it.
5. The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk
We carry the story of the things that have happened to us inside our bodies. When we experience trauma, especially as children, the events have ways of coming back and causing us trouble in an effort to be remembered and dealt with. Van Der Kolk’s book is a field guide to the traumas that haunt so many of us—and what can be done about them.
(And three more fiction picks because, you know, “three” and because the nerd in me couldn’t resist. Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman, Assassins’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb, and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.)