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.