Annual Summer Reading List...Continued from page 1

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor.  Emerging from the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, Taylor delivers an 874-page magnum opus on secularism and its meaning from a historical perspective.  Central to his thesis is that secularism is not a single, continuous transformation but rather a series of departures.  Further, that secularism is not marked by an absence of religion as much as the multiplication of options available which may be seized in order to make sense of our lives and give shape to our spiritual inclinations.

Unchristian by Steve Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons.  The findings of a study which revealed that those outside of the Christian faith think Christians no longer represent what Jesus had in mind.  We’re seen as hyper-political, out of touch, pushy in our beliefs, and arrogant – and most of all, homophobic, hypocritical, and judgmental.   (Disclosure:  I was one of several “essay” contributors to the book, along with Chuck Colson, Andy Crouch, Louie Giglio, Dan Kimball, Brian McLaren, Chris Seay, Andy Stanley, John Stott, Jim Wallis, and Rick Warren).

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.  In this remarkable and highly readable new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who brought equal skill to their translations of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, one of the great works of world literature is brought to life for our day.  Easily destined to become the definitive English edition.

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross.  The music critic for The New Yorker explores modern music in all its forms, from Stravinsky to the Velvet Underground, and how it illumines the world in which we live.  Beginning in Vienna before the First World War, Ross’ sweeping narrative carries us to Paris in the twenties, on to Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, through to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies.  As the flyleaf promises, “the end result is not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century through music.”
 
American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic by Joseph Ellis.  The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Founding Brothers and His Excellency examines the founding years of our country.  Noting that both success and tragedy during the last quarter of the eighteenth century shaped our burgeoning nation, Ellis “guides us through the decisive issues of the nation’s founding, and illuminates the emerging philosophies, shifting alliances, and personal and political foibles of our now iconic leaders.”  Much that shaped those early years continues to shape us – this book helps us understand how, and why.

Modernism by Peter Gay.  The single best book for understanding the Enlightenment was penned by Peter Gay.  It can now be said that he has written the single best book for understanding modernism.  Originating in the middle of the nineteenth century, through such founding figures as Flaubert and Baudelaire, the history of modernism continued through such figures as Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Igor Stavinsky, T.S. Eliot, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles – down to our day, with the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.  Through its “ability to integrate the history of art and literature with the Western society it changed forever, Modernism informs our present like no other recent work of cultural history.” 

James Emery White

2007 List

To view last year’s list, visit:
http://www.serioustimes.com/Blog.asp?ID=37

Bonus Consideration from the Shameless Commerce Division:

Wrestling with God by James Emery White (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2008).  Originally published as Embracing the Mysterious God (2004 Award of Merit Winner from Christianity Today), now available in paperback (and now benefiting from the title given its release in the United Kingdom).  To explore, visit: http://www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=3363; to order, visit   http://www.amazon.com/Wrestling-God-Loving-Dont-Understand/dp/0830833633/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212792749&sr=1-10.