compiled by Professor David Lyle Jeffrey
The following list is divided into three categories: (1) classic works of Christian spirituality and devotional theology; (2) post-enlightenment and modern works of Christian intellectual and cultural criticism; (3) great novels, poems and plays whose Christian content and/or asking of questions central in their importance to accountable Christian reflection make them a desirable part of the well-tempered, well-furbished apostolic mind.
I. CLASSIC FOUNDATIONS
| Athanasius | On the Incarnation of the Word |
|
Augustine |
Confessions |
| Boethius | Consolation of Philosophy |
| Gregory the Great | Pastoral Care |
|
John Chrysostom |
Homilies on 1 and 2 Corinthians |
| Anselm of Canterbury | Truth, Freedom and Evil Cur Deus Homo? Proslogion |
| Basil | On the Holy Spirit |
|
Bernard of Clairvaux |
On Loving God Sermons on Charity |
|
Thomas Aquinas |
Summa Theologica, 5 vols. (Christian Classics) |
| Bonaventure | The Mind’s Road to God |
| Walter Hilton | Ladder of Perfection |
| Thomas à Kempis | Imitation of Christ |
|
Martin Luther |
On the Bondage of the Will |
|
John Calvin |
Institutes |
| Thomas More | The English Prayers of Sir Thomas More |
| Blaise Pascal | Pensées |
| Thomas Browne | Religio Medici |
| Richard Baxter | Saints’ Everlasting Rest |
| Ignaius of Loyola | Spiritual Exercises |
| John of the Cross | Dark Night of the Soul |
| Theresa of Avila | The Way of Perfection |
| Lancelot Andrewes | Private Prayers |
| Isaac Watts | Guide to Prayer |
| William Law | Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life |
| Phillip Doddridge | The Rise and Progress of the Soul |
| John and Charles Wesley | Spiritual Writings (Paulist Press) |
| Charles Simeon | Memoirs |
| John Henry Newman | Apologia Pro Vita Sua |
|
Søren Kierkegaard |
Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (Princeton) |
|
C.S. Lewis |
Mere Christianity |
| Dietrich Bonhoeffer | The Cost of Discipleship |
|
Watchman Nee |
The Normal Christian Life |
| J.I. Packer | Knowing God |
|
A.W. Tozer |
The Knowledge of the Holy |
| Josemaria Escriva |
The Way |
| Simone Weil | Waiting for God |
| Hans Urs Von Balthassar | On Prayer |
|
John Paul II |
Letter to Families |
II. CHRISTIAN INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL CRITICISM
A. Focusing on the Patristic Era |
|
|
Jaroslav Pelikan |
The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago) |
|
Bernard Lonergan |
The Road to Nicea |
|
F.F. Bruce |
The Canon Of Scripture |
B. Medieval through Reformation |
|
| Fredrick Coppleston | A History of Philosophy (Penguin) |
| C.S. Lewis | The Discarded Image (Oxford) |
| Gillian Evans | The Language and Logic of the Bible, 2 vols. (Cambridge) |
| Beryl Smalley | The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame) |
| Etienne Gilson |
Thomas Aquinas |
| Alistair McGrath |
The Intellectual Origins of the European |
| Heiko Oberman | Luther (Image) |
| William J. Bowsma | John Calvin (Oxford) |
| Dom David Knowles | Saints and Scholars |
| E. Harris Harbison | The Christian Scholar in the Age of Reformation |
C. Enlightenment and Early Modern |
|
| Donald Davie | A Gathered Church |
| William Paley | Evidences of Christianity |
| D.L. Jeffrey, ed. | English Spirituality in the Age of Wesley (Eerdmans) |
D. Modern |
|
| 1. Arts and Humanities | |
| Hannah Arendt |
Between Past and Future |
| Herbert Butterfield | Christianity and History (Bell) |
| Dorothy Sayers | The Mind of the Maker (Methune) |
| G.K. Chesterton |
The Everlasting Man (Doubleday Image) |
| Jacque Ellul |
The Technological Society (Seabury) |
| T.S. Eliot | The Idea of a Christian Society |
| W.H.V. Reade | The Christian Challenge to Philosophy |
| John A. MacMurray |
The Self as Agent (Faber) |
| George Grant | Technology and Justice |
| David L. Jeffrey |
People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary |
| Harry Blamires | The Christian Mind (Seabury) |
| Mark Noll | The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans) |
| Paul Ricoeur | History and Truth (Northwestern) |
| George Marsden | The Soul of the American University (Oxford) |
| J.I. Packer and Thomas Howard | Christianity: The True Humanism (Word) |
| Nicholas Wolterstorff | Reason Within the Bounds of Religion |
| Keith Yandell | Christianity and Philosophy (Eerdmans) |
| 2. Science | |
| Herbert Butterfield | Christianity and Science |
| Paul Davies |
God and the New Physics |
| Jean Daujat |
Physique moderne et philosophie traditionelle (Desclée) Le système du monde. Histoire des doctrines cosmologique de Platon a Copernic (Hermann) Le théorie physique (Minerva) |
| Phillip Johnson |
Reason in the Balance: the Case against |
| John Eccles and Daniel Robinson |
The Wonder of being Human, Our Brain and our Mind (Free Press) |
| R. Harre |
The Philosophies of Science (Oxford) |
| W. Heisenberg |
Physics and Philosophy, The Revolution in |
| Mary Midgley | Science and Salvation (RKP) |
| Stanley Jaki |
Cosmos and Creator (Scottish Academic Press) The Relevance of Physics (Chicago) |
| Jacques Maritain | Science et Sagesse (Desclée) |
| Roger Penrose | The Emperor’s New Mind |
| Emile Simard |
La Nature et la portée de la methode |
| William Wallace |
Causality and Scientific Explanation (U. Mich.) From a Realist Point of View: Essays on the Philosophy of Science (U. Press of America) |
| 3. Law | |
| Huntington Cairns | Legal Philosophy from Plato to Hegel (Johns Hopkins) |
| Benjamin Cardozo | The Nature of the Judicial Process (Yale) |
| Oliver W. Holmes | The Common Law (Yale) |
| Roscoe Pound | Justice According to Law (Yale) |
| Samuel Rutherford | Lex Rex |
| 4. Social Sciences | |
| Peter Berger | A Rumor of Angels (Doubleday) |
| C.S. Lewis | The Abolition of Man (MacMillan) |
| Jacques Ellul |
The Meaning of the City (Eerdmans) |
| William K. Kilpatrick | Psychological Seduction (Nelson) |
| Neil Postman | Amusing Ourselves to Death |
| Paul Tournier | The Meaning of Persons (SCM) |
| Mary Stewart van Leeuwen | The Person in Psychology (Eerdmans) |
| Paul Vitz |
Psychology as Religion: the Cult of |
| 5. Philosophical Theology | |
| Donald Bloesch |
Theology of Word and Spirit (IVP) |
| O. O’Donovan | Resurrection and Moral Order (Eerdmans) |
| T.F. Torrance |
God and Rationality (Oxford) |
| Diogenes Allen | Christian Belief in a Postmodern World(Westminster) |
| Carl Henry | God, Revelation and Authority 6 vols. (Word) |
| A. Plantinga | God, Freedom, and Evil (Eerdmans) |
| A. Plantinga and N. Wolterstorff | Faith and Rationality (Notre Dame) |
| R. Swinburne |
The Coherence of Theism (Oxford) |
| Alasdair MacIntyre | Three Rival Genealogies of Moral Inquiry (Notre Dame) |
| Cardinal J. Ratzinger | In the Beginning (Eerdmans) |
| Bernard Lonergan | Insight (Darton, Longman and Todd) |
| Hans Urs Von Balthassar |
The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, 3 vols.; trans. E. Leiva-Merikakis (Ignatius) |
III. INDISPENSABLE WORKS OF LITERATURE
| Donald Davie | Christian Poetry: An Anthology |
| Dante | Divine Comedy |
| Christopher Marlowe | The Tragicall Historie of Doctor Faustus |
| William Roper | The Life of Thomas More |
| George Herbert | The Temple |
| John Donne |
Holy Sonnets, etc. |
| John Bunyan |
Pilgrim’s Progress |
| John Milton |
Paradise Lost |
| William Shakespeare |
A Winter’s Tale |
| Charlotte Brontë | Jane Eyre |
| Fyodor Dostoevski |
Crime and Punishment |
| Albert Camus | La Peste |
| Leo Tolstoy |
War and Peace |
| G.M. Hopkins | Poems |
| François Mauriac |
Viper’s Tangle |
| John Betjeman | Summoned by Bells |
| C.S. Lewis |
That Hideous Strength |
| T.S. Eliot |
Poems |
| Charles Williams |
Descent into Hell |
| J.R.R. Tolkien | The Lord of the Rings |
| Graham Green |
The Power and the Glory |
| Alexander Solzhenitsyn | One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich |
| Walker Percy |
Lost in the Cosmos |
| Flannery O’Connor |
Collected Stories |
| Wendell Berry |
Fidelity (stories) |
| Margaret Avison |
Collected Poems |
| George Bernanos | Diary of a Country Priest |
| P.D. James | Children of Men |