October, National Book Month, is a time for “best book” recommendation lists. I have a hard time being objective about the highly subjective experience of reading, so here’s my personal list not of “the best” but of titles that educated me.
Please note: The following reflects idiosyncratic if not idiotic interests. Six works about the past that suggest what to do in the present. Six looks at the present that can help us avoid past policy errors. Six on theology that might help us avoid future terrors. Three hard-to-classify works that have helped me avoid following the crowd.
Past
Alvin J. Schmidt, How Christianity Changed the World (Zondervan, 2001). The advent of Christianity transformed charity, sexual conduct, medical care, education, science, literature, the arts, business and labor, and a host of other fields.
Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random House, 2005). For many centuries, typical lives were poorer, nastier, shorter, and more brutish and solitary than many historians like to admit. The Christian doctrine that we are personally responsible for sin led to the extension of liberty and economic opportunity in the early modern era.
Jason Phillips, Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future (Oxford, 2018). What happens when polarization creates pessimism? Many “felt dragged into a terrifying future [as] unreason and dread” poisoned politics, and the telegraph offered “instantaneous information that promised more knowledge than it delivered.”
Tom Holland, Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age (Basic, 2023). We might think, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, that all are created equal and endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but those rights were not self-evident in the Greco-Roman world of slavery and sexual abuse.
Timothy W. Ryback, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power (Knopf, 2024). Publishing mogul Alfred Hugenberg, looking for a bulwark against socialism, supported National Socialism and backed Hitler at the make-or-break moment early in 1933. The next day he told a friend, “I just made the biggest mistake of my life.” The next year his publishing empire became part of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry.
Molly Worthen, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump (Forum, 2025). Through four centuries of history, some leaders have gained followers by charm—but charisma is more powerful, and sometimes rational explanations of it fall short.
Present
Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor … and Yourself (Moody, 2009). Those who still hope to put compassionate conservatism into practice need good how-to advice. The key is not to treat people like beasts lacking moral agency but to see everyone as fully human with God-given skills—and to help people see themselves that way.
Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009). Government-to-government aid from Western countries to Africa has led to dependency and corruption. Humanitarian aid and financial development can help.
Howard A. Husock, Who Killed Civil Society? The Rise of Big Government and Decline of Bourgeois Norms(Encounter, 2019). U.S. poverty-fighting works when it promotes what I’d call an American three-self doctrine: self-respect, self-control, self-government. Today, though, we turn the spotlight not on the strengths of the poor but on their weaknesses.
Stephen Eide, Homelessness in America: The History and Tragedy of an Intractable Social Problem (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022). We err by emphasizing roof causes rather than root causes, such as addiction, alcohol, and mental illness. We should ease up on Housing First requirements, take a “fix it first” approach to affordable housing, reform the mental healthcare system, and stop breaking promises.
Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (Harper, 2023). Here’s the best explanation I’ve read of the theological aberrations that contributed to the January 2021 attack on the Capitol. It’s also the best of the books wondering about the prospects for civil war as right and left move further apart, with religious justifications thrown in.
Timothy P. Carney, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be(Harper, 2024). With four children, I restrain myself from advising young parents. Maybe Carney with six gets a hall pass, yet some readers may dislike being told to avoid helicopter parenting and enrolling children in travel sports.
Religion
N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress Press, 2003). Wright brings us back to the central issue with logical analysis and thorough research. He patiently lays out evidence that the New Testament narratives of an empty tomb and post-resurrection meetings were so countercultural that they had to be reports of actual events rather than made-up spiritual self-encouragement.
Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (Viking, 2008). Pastor Keller shows how belief in Christ is sound and sensible, objective truth and subjective liberty are not opposed, thoughts of justice apart from God are irrational, and suffering brings sunrise as often as sunset.
Paul E. Miller, J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life (Crossway, 2019). The Christian life is shaped like a capital J, with descent on the left and ascent on the right. Not just once but repeatedly, Christians die to convenience, worldly success, and approval, only to be resurrected into repentance, humility, and hope.
David Gibson, Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End (Crossway, 2017). Gibson notes that, at funerals, instead of racing away to resume our normal activities, we should linger in the realization that it will soon be our turn. Asking the question “What will my life have been worth?” yields not morbidity but an eagerness to use each day for God’s glory.
Matthew McCullough, Remember Death: The Surprising Path to Living Hope (Gospel Coalition, 2018). Question: “How can you enjoy anything about life if you know that, in the end, the more you love something the more it will hurt when you lose it?” Buddhists say the answer is non-attachment to anyone and anything. McCullough shows how Christians can see that bid and raise it through Christ’s promise of eternal life.
Rebecca McLaughlin, The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims (The Gospel Coalition, 2021). How should we react to yard signs proclaiming “Love Is Love”? McLaughlin helps us distinguish between racial equality (a biblical concept) and same sex marriage (unbiblical). She shows why Christianity is the basis for supporting women’s rights and opposing transgender trends, and doing so without mocking others.
Alternative Ways of Thinking
Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2004). In baseball, as in every other pursuit, those who outthink others usually go further than those who outspend. Undervalued assets surround us, and leaders in journalism, academia, and elsewhere should wise up.
Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (2008). This book, with its sequels, Darwin’s Doubt (2013) and Return of the God Hypothesis (2021), make the case for the reality of a Creator who intelligently designed everything. Those with a “Science Is Real” sign on their lawns should logically put a “God Is Real” sign next to it.
Robert A. Caro, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing (Knopf, 2019). Caro, LBJ’s and Robert Moses’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, admonishes us to “turn over every page” in libraries and, when interviewing, to keep asking for specific descriptions: “What would I see?” Caro relinquished some “work-life balance” to persevere in “asking the same question over and over again. If you just keep doing it, it’s amazing what comes out of people.”
