Over the years, I’ve taken notes on the books I’ve read on Christianity-related topics. This section of the blogsite will include those notes.
The books naturally reflect my own interests and, since in any event I can’t read everything in this area, the list is inevitably to some degree idiosyncratic. And there are lots of books important to me that don’t make the list because I read them before I started taking notes, and because some books — like Pensees and Mere Christianity, to give the two most obvious examples since they lend their names to this blogsite — were so formative for me and so uniformly profound that it would be hard for me to pick and choose what to note in them.
Still, I think the list does mirror obvious issues and topics that many face on their journeys as Christians. There are apologetics proper, of course — to strengthen our faith and to help us in fulfilling the Great Commission. There are books on how to interpret the Bible; relatedly, there are books about how the people back then lived (here I admit I was happy to read short books aimed at “young adults” and even “juvenile literature”) and what their non-Christian rulers believed and thought — in sum, the world we have to know something about if we are to understand and appreciate fully the words in Scripture. There are biographies of key Bible figures — James, Peter, and Paul, for example. All Christians wonder, too, about how best to pray — a question put by the disciples to Jesus, after all. And of course there is much on my heroes, C.S. Lewis and Blaise Pascal.