TEDS President offers his list of best books

“There is no end to the making of many books,” says the author of Ecclesiastes. In the United States alone, there were close to one million titles published during the past year, with revenue approaching $1.8 billion. Hundreds of titles competed for our attention during 2016.

I offer the following observations with the recognition that I have no doubt missed several important works that some of you would have included in such a survey. The books not..

Faith Cook is an author, biographer, and hymn writer. She grew up as a missionary child in war-torn China and has chronicled her story in an autobiography.

Her own biographical work has been on both men:

Fearless Pilgrim: The Life and Times of John Bunyan
William Grimshaw of Haworth and women:

The Nine Day Queen of England: Lady Jane Grey,

Selina: Countess of Huntingdon: Her Pivotal Role in the 18th Century Evangelical Awakening, and Anne Bradstreet: Pilgrim and Poet

There are many things that I have great admiration for, but perhaps one of the things I enjoy the most is seeing a long-awaited, labor of love come to full fruition. The tenacity, hard work, dedication, and pitfalls along the way in seeing something through to the end is something that, for lack of better terms, gets me emotionally invested in a project. Yet not all projects are equal and not all catch my particular attention – but if we’re truthful, that’s precisely what makes these types of th..

Our picks for the books most likely to shape evangelical life, thought, and culture.

Make a list of all the blessings the Protestant Reformation has brought, and eventually—long after jotting down iconic phrases like “salvation by grace alone through faith alone”—you’ll get around to the CT Book Awards.

Books, of course, had existed long before Luther posted his 95 Theses. But there’s no denying that reading and the Reformation, with a vital assist from Gutenberg’s printing press, soared toget..

Pastors and elders want thinking women in the church, right? And yet popular beliefs that came out of the nineteenth century’s cult of domesticity still seem to linger in the evangelical culture today. Back then, people taught that women’s brains were inferior to men’s intellectually and that women needed to reserve their energy and blood flow for reproductive purposes. These are ideas we usually joke about now, even to provoke a woman in innocent fun, because we know them to be scientifically p..

A reader recently asked the question: Do you have a suggested list of books for teenagers, something like a “Ten best books every Christian teenager should read?” It surprised me that I have never compiled such a list, especially since I’ve got two teenagers of my own. I decided I’d better remedy this oversight straight away. Here, then, is a list of ten great books every Christian teen ought to read—or at least consider reading.

Please note that these are not necessarily the ten best books your teens will read in their lifetime. Not all of these books will stand the test of time as Christian classics. But each of them is suited to twenty-first century teenaged readers and together they will provide a foundation for the Christian life that will prove both deep and wide. I list them in no particular order.

The Holiness of God by R.C. Sproul. It is rare that a book is elevated to the ranks of the classics, but The Holiness of God is a prime candidate. Sproul’s book will introduce teens..

Books, books, books …

What is the best book you’ve read on Science and Christian faith?

It seems to be the season … not the holiday season, but the book season. I recently received three new books. Books by a physicist, a biologist (with training in theology as well), and a philosopher. All three tackle questions of science and Christian faith. Each of the three presents an interesting perspective – and I intend to dig into them more completely over the upcoming months.

Peter Bussey’s book, Sign..

This year I have been participating in the 2016 Reading Challenge, a fun way to increase and diversify your reading through another year. I took the challenge and set this year’s goal at 104 books. However, because so much of my reading has to go toward reviewing books that are recently published and of interest to Christians (both for reviews published here and in WORLD magazine), I decided to pick from all over the list rather than working through it in order. What follows are the books I completed in September and October and, in parentheses, the reading challenge category they fulfill. Below that is the complete list of categories I need to cover. As you can see, I did not finish many books over the past couple of months, something that is not unusual as my reading ebbs and flows over the course of the year.

You can see my previous updates for January, February, March-April, May, June, and July-August.

Sexual Morality in a Christless World by Matthew Rueger. This is a brilliant w..

My church has recently launched a series on community called Better Together. In conjunction with the sermon series, I, in collaboration with my senior pastor, wrote a small group curriculum to compliment the series. I love community, which is why I love small groups. Like many of you, I work hard on our small group system at my church to equip leaders and to help many in my church experience the fullness of community—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

However, as I continue to reflect on communi..

Life brings occasions, both good and bad, that serve as natural chapter breaks in our own narrative. Dealing with the good ones is enjoyable, and there’s usually time to prepare for things like a wedding and the birth of a child. There’s no preparation for the bad ones, though. They happen, and you flee to wherever—whomever—you find refuge.

For John Feinberg, longtime professor of biblical and systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and his wife, Pat, that day came on Novemb..