Religion Reading List

My Episcopalian aunt (she is married to my wife's step-uncle) works in her church's Sunday school and is interested in improving her religious education so she asked me for a suggested reading list. Here are my recommendations. My criteria were books that are intellectually sophisticated that avoided the obvious polemics from either an orthodox or anti-religious positions. I also made a point of including books dealing with Church attitudes towards Jews and women. I would be curious as to what other suggestions blog readers would make. 


Bible:

Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book by Timothy Beal.

Prophets by Abraham Heschel.  

The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs. 

In God's Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible by Michael Walzer. 


Judaism:

Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism by Sarah Bunin Benor. 

American Judaism: A History by Jonathan Sarna. 

The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised by Marc B. Shapiro. 

This is My God by Herman Wouk. 


Jewish and Christian Relations:

Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism by Daniel Boyarin 

Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism, 1500-1750 by Elisheva Carlebach.

Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages by Mark Cohen. 

Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Jewish Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times by Jacob Katz.

Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages by Hyam Maccoby.  

Early Christianity:

Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium by Bart D. Ehrman. 

When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger. 


Medieval Christianity:

Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women by Caroline Walker Bynum. 

The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements by Norman Cohn.  

Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages by Dyan Elliott.

Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 by R. I. Moore. 


Modernity:

Theological Origins of Modernity by Michael Allen Gillespie. 

God is Back How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. 

Secular Age by Charles Taylor.

United States:

Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat. 

Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kathryn Gin Lum.

Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark Noll.  

Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - And Doesn't by Stephen Prothero.

American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell. 

The Unlikely Disciple: a Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University by Kevin Roose. 

Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back by Frank Schaeffer.


Psychology:

Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.

Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion by Rodney Stark and Roger Finke. 

Ross Douthat on Libertarianism

Ross Douthat has a very good response to the Chris Beam article on libertarianism, which I posted on earlier. While Douthat accepts that many libertarian policies might not be practical, for that is beside the point.


But Beam's "of course, we'll never get there" kicker substantially undercuts the power and relevance of this critique. It's precisely because we're so far from minarchy, with no prospects for getting even remotely close, that libertarian arguments deserve a bit more respect and consideration than Beam's dismissive attitude affords them. If Congress was stocked with a few hundred members of the Paul family, if Penn Jillette ran the T.S.A., if the Cato Institute held veto power over every entitlement expansion and overseas military operation, it would make sense to use a long magazine article to fret, in detail, about the perils associated with the minimal state. But as it stands, Beam's lengthy critique of minarchy seems better suited to a college bull-session argument than to an article about American political economy as it actually exists, in all its bloated and not-at-all minimalist glory.
In this real world, the crucial question for non-libertarians pondering the movement's (modestly) growing influence isn't whether a libertarian minarchy would be the utopia that some enthusiasts imagine or a dog-eat-dog nightmare instead. Rather, it's whether a more-empowered libertarianism could have a salutary impact on debates over, say, the future of the entitlement system … or the reform of our incarceration policies … or the growth of the national-security state (to pick just a few rather pressing-seeming issues).


Douthat has hit on what may be the biggest practical strength; that we offer an opportunity to transcend the traditional partisan debate and can offer compromise solutions that both sides might be willing to accept. I admit that I often frame discussions about libertarianism in their most extreme forms, such as arguing for the legalization of child prostitution, in order to make the point that I am actually consistent in my beliefs and am willing to follow them through on their downside in order to enjoy the positives. That is the theoretical strength of libertarianism. So to reemphasize the practical, I recognize that this country was not founded on strictly libertarian principles and that over the past century, in many respects, we have moved even further away from libertarian government. That being said, I still do see a libertarian government as the goal which I set before myself as my compass even if I know that we will never got there. In the meantime I am willing to work with liberals or conservatives at any given time to bring about policies that go in this direction. To all my liberal readers, yes public schools are here to stay for the near future. Now we may not want creationism taught in them, but do we really want the courts to be the ones to stop it. Keep in mind that conservatives are going to respond by trying to place their people on the bench to push a conservative agenda that goes way beyond education. For your own safety does it not make sense to simply get the federal government and the courts out of education and simply leave it as a local affair? Otherwise do not come crying to me when conservatives get politically energized, gain control of the government and try pushing their vision of America on you.