My Most Influential Books:

  • Augustine: Confessions
  • Frederick Buechner: Telling the Truth
  • G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy
  • Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, The Possessed
  • C.S. Lewis: The Weight of Glory
  • Blaise Pascal: Penseés
  • Dorothy Sayers: Mind of the Maker
  • Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago, The First Circle
  • Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Resurrection, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Superior Books in Style and Christian Content:

  • Georges Bernanos: Diary of a Country Priest
  • Frederick Buechner: Telling the Truth, The Hungering Dark, The Magnificent Defeat, The Alphabet of Grace, Now and Then, The Sacred Journey, Peculiar Treasures, Wishful Thinking, The Book of Bebb, The Final Beast, Godric
  • Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Teaching a Stone to Talk
  • John Donne: Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
  • Shūsaku Endō: Silence
  • Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory, The End of the  Affair, Monsignor Quixote
  • Francois Mauriac: Viper’s Tangle, Woman of the Pharisees, The Weakling, A Kiss for the Leper
  • Flannery O’Connor: any of her three novels and numerous short stories, also The Habit of Being
  • Alan Paton: Cry, the Beloved Country
  • Walker Percy: The Second Coming, Love Among the Ruins
  • Jean Sulivan: Morning Light

Christian Essayists with Style:

  • G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy, St. Francis, St. Thomas, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Everlasting Man
  • C.S. Lewis: just about anything.  My favorites: A Grief Observed, Weight of Glory, The Four Loves
  • Dorothy Sayers: Mind of the Maker, Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World

Other Stimulating Books:

  • Will Campbell: Brother To a Dragonfly
  • Robert Farrar Capon: Hunting the Divine Fox, Between Noon and Three, The Third Peacock
  • George MacDonald: Life Essential
  • Jurgen Moltmann: Experiences of God, The Crucified God
  • Lesslie Newbigin: numerous works in theology
  • Lewis Smedes: numerous works
  • John V. Taylor: The Go-Between God
  • Helmut Thielicke: any collection of his sermons