Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918). This book is, in a way, the first modern memoir. Adams, the descendant of John and John Quincy Adams, may end up leaving a more significant legacy to America than his presidential forebears. The Modern Library listed it as the No. 1 nonfiction book of the 20th century. Indeed, the insights the book offers regarding the then just emerging technological world (the “dynamo”), in contrast to culture built on Christian ideals, symbolized by the “Virgin” of the great medieval cathedrals, is a powerful critique of the modern malaise that rings true nearly a century after it was written. ISBN 0192823698
Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (196X). This play, which later became an outstanding movie, brought Sir Thomas More alive for me, and helped me overcome some of my Protestant bigotry, opening my eyes and heart to a world of Catholic thinkers from Tolkien to Neuhaus. ISBN 0679728228
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (1937). This book I also read as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, and between Bonhoeffer's Lutheranism and Lewis's Anglicanism, I began to question if perhaps Southern Baptists had all the truth, or if others might know a few things, too. ISBN 0684815001
Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952). What WORLD Magazine calls a “moving autobiography and reflective mediation” is also one of most important documents in the post-New Deal resurgence of conservativism. It tells the story of a communist spy who became a Christian and whose subsequent life and testimony shook the very foundations of modern liberalism. ISBN 0895267896
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). I was in high school when this book was published, and I started hearing about it from my backpacking buddies. When I finally read it, this Christian version of Walden, written by a young girl barely older than myself, I was both exhilarated and discouraged. She had written the book I had always wanted to write! As I look back over this book a quarter-century later, I am aware of some of its limitations – both theologically and rhetorically – but I still strongly recommend it. ISBN 0060953020
T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (1963). I had read “Prufrock” while an undergraduate, but didn't get it at all. It took Marion Montgomery and Russell Kirk's “Eliot and His Age” for me to understand what an important figure Eliot was to 20th century literature and Christian thought. Eliot called himself “a minor poet in an age that would produce no major poets.” Perhaps, but he was pretty important to many in the development of a biblical worldview. ISBN 0151189781
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953). This book, and Kirk's founding of the journal “Modern Age,” brought about a revival of conservative thought in America. Kirk is both scholarly and readable, and never fails to point out that conservatism without roots in a Christian worldview is just as tyrannical as an atheistic liberalism. ISBN 0895261715
Russell Kirk, Eliot and His Age (197X). Though not the best book ever written on Eliot, this one was the most helpful to me. Kirk helped me understand Eliot's vision of Christianity and culture, and how a Christian culture might be recovered in this modern age. ISBN 0893852473
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1943). When I read this book, as a freshman in college, half of what I had learned in church fell into place, and the other half I started to seriously question. This book, for me and for millions of others, was the dividing line between merely being a convert, and striving toward discipleship. As WORLD Magazine's editors put it: “Modernists did not realize that Christianity made so much sense or was so exhilarating until they read Lewis, the century's foremost defender of the faith.” ISBN 0060652926
Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (198X). This collection of letters, brilliantly edited and annotated by Sally Fitzgerald, is one I have gone back to time after time. For those new to O'Connor, I recommend reading a couple of her short stories – such as “Revelation” and “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” – and then diving into these letters, all before tackling her novels. ISBN 0374521042
Marvin Olasky, Prodigal Press (199X). I started “The Charlotte Christian News” several years before I read this book, but this book caused me to re-think everything about what we were doing. Prodigal Press is particularly helpful in tracing the Christian roots of American journalism and in identifying events, individuals, and eras that led to a decline in Christian influence and a rise in anti-Christian bias among the media elite. ISBN 0891074767
Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion (1992). I found this book important not only because of its subject – the modern welfare state – but because of its rhetorical strategy. Olasky demonstrates how great reporting and solid historical research can make biblical ideas not only plausible but compelling, to the believer and the skeptic alike. This book, as much as any other single document, helped bring about welfare reform in the late 1990s, and helped form the basis of George W. Bush's “compassionate conservatism.” ISBN 089526725X
LeAnne Payne, The Broken Image (1981). Payne is a well-known leader of prayer and renewal conferences, and is also a C.S. Lewis scholar. In this book, she identifies the root cause of sexual sin – particularly homosexuality – as a flawed image of God, the Creator, leading to a broken image of ourselves. When we understand God's nature and accept His “image,” or the way He chooses to reveal Himself to us, we move toward healing of our own brokenness. This book has far-reaching implications both theologically – and in the way we communicate biblical truth to a broken world. ISBN 080105334X
Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos (1983). When I first read this book, I thought it was something of a hodge-podge, but I have come to believe that both in content and in rhetorical strategy – a combination of short stories, essays, and a mock self-help quiz – it brilliantly exploits and satirizes the way the modern mind processes information. ISBN 0312253990
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1960). Walker Percy's first novel is still my favorite. When the book was published, it won the National Book Award, and established the middle-aged Percy as the “next big thing” on the American literary scene. He lived up to all the early billing, and his increasing faith in Christ became something that his fans and critics had to deal with head-on. ISBN 0375701966
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). This book, written before Bill Clinton was elected president, nonetheless presciently explained how Clinton could retain high approval ratings even in the midst of scandal: He provided us with great entertainment. The subtitle of this book, “Public Discourse In The Age Of Show Business,” suggests what the reader of this book quickly discovers: that public discourse in all areas – economic, religious, political, and others – is seriously compromised by modern mass media techniques. Christians who say that we “must use modern methods without changing the ancient message” are victims of self-deception, Postman suggests. Content is a fluid that conforms to the shape of the medium into which it is poured. If the Gospel is poured into a television, it comes out looking like a television, not like the gospel. The chapter “Shuffle Off To Bethelehem” is particularly helpful on this point. This book is particularly meaningful if read as a companion to Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences (see below). ISBN 0140094385
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-1956). It took me a year to read Tolkien's trilogy the first time I attacked it, as a ninth grader in Georgia. However, later it attacked me, and I read The Hobbit and the Trilogy in a marathon ten-day read while recovering from an illness. Truly one of the great literary works of the 20th century, if not many other centuries. ISBN 0395595118
Jay Tolson, A Pilgrim in the Ruins (1993). This outstanding biography of Walker Percy helped me understand the importance of Percy, and the power of biography, in the development of a biblical worldview. Biographies can be powerful testimonies of God's work and his saving and sanctifying grace. But biographies – the story of another's journey -- can also help the pilgrim see the next step to take for himself. This biography of a Christian artist I admired had this effect on me. I read it about the time I started “The Charlotte Christian News” and it has informed several of my “next steps.” ISBN 0671657070
Twelve Southerners. I'll Take My Stand (1930). The writers of the 12 essays in this book came to be known as the Agrarians, though many of them had also contributed to a Nashville-based literary magazine, “The Fugitive,” in the 1920s. Of the 12, John Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Andrew Lytle made lasting contributions to American letters. Though religion is not a central idea of this book (only one chapter is specifically devoted to it, and that essay is written by Allen Tate – before he became a Christian) it is interesting that several of these men – including Lytle and Tate – ultimately understood the pre-eminent role in Southern and American life, and several of them came to ultimately view the Civil War as a conflict between Modernism and Christendom. A modern Battle of Troy, with slavery being the Achilles Heel that dooms an otherwise superior, more noble people and cause. ISBN 0807103578
Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy (1977). This powerful love story for many years shaped my hopes and dreams for my own marriage. Nearly 20 years of marriage allows me to see that it is hopelessly sentimental in places. Nonetheless, when I read it, it propelled me more deeply into writers such as C. S. Lewis, and opened up to me the world of “The New Oxford Review,” to which Vanauken was a contributor for many years. With its exotic locations, including Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and Oxford during the tenure of Lewis, I still don't see why someone hasn't made a movie out of this book. Maybe someday.... ISBN 0060688246
Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (1947). Another catalyst of the conservative revival, this is another book that took Marion Montgomery to help me de-cipher. However, once I started understanding, the more I understood, and I have gone back to this little book time after time – and have never failed to come away with fresh insights. I particularly recommend the first chapter, “The Unsentimental Sentiment,” and the chapter on the modern media, “The Great Stereopticon.” This book, perhaps more than any other except Marvin Olasky's Prodigal Press, has provided us with a roadmap for the kind of newspapers we want to produce at World Newspaper Publishing. ISBN 0226876802
