Fyodor Dostoevsky

What can I say about Dostoevsky that hasn’t been said better, in dissertations and studies and monuments? Only this: he lives up to the hype; he changed my life.

I started with The Brothers Karamazov, went on to The House of the Dead, and then Crime and Punishment, and Notes from the Underground.

The Brothers was recommended by an older cousin. He was in college, and I was 13, but he was my hero, so… I finished it 5 years later. The second reading, a few years after that, only took a month. It’s one of those great novels designed to last through nine months of television-less winter, so it has it all: philosophy, religion, sex, murder, poverty, mental disorders, and courtroom drama. If big Russian novels scare you, you’d be better off starting with Anna Karenina.

I haven’t re-read The House of the Dead. It’s not bad-in fact, it’s probably as good as it gets in the genre of prison memoirs, topped only by Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Illych. But how many times do you want to read a prison memoir?

If all of the monuments and dissertations were to somehow disappear, I can imagine scholars thousands of years from now arguing convincingly that Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground were written in the late 1900s instead of the mid-1800s. The word angst comes to mind, but it’s insufficient. We’re talking antiheroes with attitudes so bad they’d see the Fight Club guys as optimists.

Dostoevsky isn’t an author who will make you happy. His comedy scenes can bring a smile, but the smiles are tinged with tragedy. No, happiness isn’t his thing. Joy, on the other hand… maybe. As the ranting drunkard who pimps his daughter asks in Crime and Punishment, what if grace can reach even me?

Leo Trepp

I grew up on Bible stories. Abraham and Moses and David and Daniel were heroes to me before I ever heard of George Washington or Tarzan. I was in college before I met a peer who knew and appreciated the Law and History and Prophets like I did. Unfortunately, I thought that this meant I understood Judaism.

It took Leo Trepp’s Judaism to show me that knowing the Scriptures the Jews revere and knowing what Jews believe isn’t the same thing.

Trepp’s tone gets a little defensive now and then, but most writers about religion get that way. I haven’t read widely enough on Judaism to be able to compare it to others on the topic, but I’m glad I read it – once.

Radhakrishnan

“Hindu apologetics.” Doesn’t something about that phrase ring not quite right?

It’s not written logically, of course, and it’s not very convincing, of course, but The Hindu View of Life is basically an attempt to frame an anti-theology into a theology.

It might be worth reading if you haven’t read anything about Hinduism and don’t have any Hindu friends and don’t feel you can learn from fiction or biography.

I won’t volunteer my Hindu friends, but I’d recommend any biography of Ghandi, Nectar in a Sieve, or many of Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories as preferable to this as an introduction to the Hindu view of life.

Augustine

I can’t think of certain books apart from the place in which I read them. The City of God, an attempt to see the hand of God in the destruction of a Christianized Rome at what was thought to be nearly the end of history… I associate that with a gas station coffee shop in a Minnesotan prairie town.

My wife had been stationed there for a few months for her medical work, and I’d just returned from a stint abroad and had a few weeks off. The gas station was the town’s only coffee shop.

And the book was amazing.

Augustine’s wordy and cumbersome, but the ideas hit me as amazingly relevant, even there. The gas station attendant gossiped with a farmer about the rape of a girl in their church as I read Augustine’s consolation to men and boys who had been raped in the sacking of Rome.

A couple farmers and the owner of the egg-processing plant (the town’s only industry) met every Tuesday and Thursday to discuss the inevitable fall of the U.S. due to its godlessness as evidenced by Hollywood, while I read Augustine’s critique of the theater and the way in which God may have saved the Romans by destroying the Coliseum.

I found myself arguing with a lot of the book, but it seemed far more insightful an analysis of late-20^th-century society than any of the modern religious pundits.

I wouldn’t have said the same the first time I read The Confessions. It struck me as pretentious. But I’ve re-read it twice since reading The City of God, and I’ve liked it more each time.

John Milton

I’ve read more mythology than most people I know, but not enough to understand John Milton.

Paradise Lost, the epic retelling of Genesis 1-3, is hard reading, but worth the work. The dozens of lines comparing angelic actions to mythic figures can cure insomnia, but other insights, particularly the demons’ debate and Adam and Eve’s relationship drip with insight and love. I doubt few poems have influenced pop culture more than his depiction of Satan and the demons bickering and strutting over control of the anarchy of hell. Deep down though, I think Dante was more on track depicting Satan as a worthless tool frozen in ice.

I picked up Milton’s Shorter Poems at a garage sale. It was in a box marked, “Please Take.” I agree with the garage-saler: many of the poems were nearly incomprehensible to me due to their references to classical mythology. But I would have paid for “Upon the Circumcision”, and “On Time.”

C.J. Muhaney

Humility, by C.J. Muhaney, is a typed version of what was probably a very good set of sermons. I read it on a Sunday afternoon.

I knew nothing about Muhaney before reading it, but found he has a sense of humor, reverence, and…humility…that left me in prayer.

I know nothing about any of his other writings, but I think I’d like him as a pastor.

Walter Wangerin, Jr.

What if the Bible had been written by a single author as a novel?

The obvious answer—that it wouldn’t have lasted thousands of years and impacted people around the world and be the Bible—didn’t stop Walter Wangerin, Jr., from trying to write it, and doing a pretty good job.

The Book of God will not change lives over the coming millennia, but it’s not a bad book. Wangerin approaches his subject with far more reverence than the majority of Bible Story writers or biblio-novelists. He slides over most of the theology, focusing instead on how the recorded events might have felt to characters from the time.

His depiction of Jesus didn’t ring true to me. And he seems to have trouble making most of the strongly masculine characters believable. But he does a great job with the Exile, and the relationship between Zachariah and Elizabeth (John the Baptist’s parents) would have been a great short story.

I don’t know that I’d ever read it again, but I can’t think of a novel based on the Bible that I’ve liked more.

Bruce A. Ware

The doctrine of the Trinity is one of the most complex and magnificent concepts in Christian doctrine. I have been greatly helped in meditating on it through the works of Augustine, Calvin, and Fuller. Looking forward to a similar encouragement, I picked up Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, by Bruce A. Ware, and left very disappointed.

Ware approaches the topic with more assurance and familiarity than the better authors, attempting to prove a hierarchy of roles, though not of essences, within the Trinity. This is ground the giants of the past avoided and cautioned against, and with good reason.

Once Ware builds his case, he then tries to distract from the highly speculative nature of his arguments by focusing on applications that his conservative readers are likely to appreciate. The argument going something like this:

Father, Son, and Spirit are equal in essence.

Father, Son, and Spirit are hierarchical in roles.

Man is created in God’s image.

Therefore, men and women are equal in essence but hierarchical in roles.

The church is created in God’s image.

Therefore, congregations and pastors are equal in essence but hierarchical in roles.

In short, he took one of the greatest mysteries of faith and turned it into a footnote for conservative evangelical arguments on gender roles.

Calvin was probably right: how God talks to himself is none of our business.

Mitch Albom

When people say something great has left them speechless, they’re often telling the truth. Genius leaves us awed beyond expression in words.

Tuesdays with Morrie, on the other hand, makes people talk.

Don Richardson

I first read Peace Child and Lords of the Earth when I was about ten years old. My parents knew I liked books about exploration and adventure, so they tried to get me interested in biographies of evangelicals in jungles. As a program, it didn’t really work. It did, however, introduce me to two of the most enjoyable books I’ve found in that genre.

The first book is Richardson’s memoir of his early work as a linguist and evangelist to a stone-age tribe in Papua New Guinea. It’s a great story, and the clearest introduction to Richardson’s life theme that God has put a “key” into the culture of each people group on earth that will allow them to understand the gospel.

Lords of the Earth deals with the same historical and geographical period, but focusing on the lives of several early martyrs in the attempt to bring the gospel to interior New Guinea.

I re-read the books a few years ago and found that, although I wasn’t as impressed with his literary style as I had been the first reading, I still found them worth recommending.

In Eternity in Their Hearts, Richardson attempts to articulate his theory of the “cultural key” and support it with historical examples. While I admire his linguistic work, his physical courage and endurance, and his storytelling ability, he doesn’t show the same strength as a historian. Several of his examples are so over-stated that the general idea loses credibility.

I heard recently that, after a few years of study—without knowing Arabic—Richardson pronounced himself an expert on Islam and said that the Qur’an was useless. If so, it’s tragic.