The President’s Reading List

Top 10 All-Time Favorites

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov

This 1881 classic of Russian literature brings together the particularities of nineteenth century Russia and the eternal human questions. In the four brothers Karamazov, we are invited to come to know ourselves. We also get a glimpse of the many ways in which human fallenness and God's redemption can manifest themselves in our world.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

This book, first introduced to me in a Dr. Barcus class during my senior year at Houghton has become one of my favorites. It is Chesterton's playful—and also very serious—effort to make a case for the Christian faith. He challenges us that it may be through our imagination, and not simply through our reason, that God's revelation in Jesus Christ comes to make sense.

Pascal, Pensees

Blaise Pascal was a brilliant mathematical and scientific mind of the 17th century—and is credited with discovering differential calculus. He also thought deeply about questions of faith—and how to make sense of a world that seemed to be such a confused mix of grandeur and tragedy. These “thoughts” were intended to become Pascal's definitive work in defense of the Christian faith. Alas, he died while still in his 30's leaving us to piece together the whole. I like it better this way—I think. If he had put it together precisely for the 17th century, it might have been less useful for today.

Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

Dorothy L. Sayers is known for her introduction to Dante's Divine Comedy, for her dramatic versions of the Life of Christ performed on the BBC in the mid-20th century, for several apologetic writings, and for her theology of aesthetics, Mind of the Maker. I would recommend all of these, but my favorite of her books is one of the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series, Gaudy Night. It was this wonderful mystery novel that first named for me the complexities of bringing together society's categories for being a successful woman and society's categories for being a successful human being—and all in the context of an Oxford college homecoming.

Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church

If you care about the issues that we confront today in America related to religion and science, church and state, religion and culture, you will benefit greatly by picking up this book. Professor Chadwick, who taught church history for many years at Cambridge, brings together in very readable narrative the origins of many of our current debates. I am thinking especially of Darwinism, issues related to the role of religion in education, and issues of Biblical higher criticism.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

I would highly recommend any of Bonhoeffer's books. As a young theologian in Nazi Germany, he was faced with very practical questions of what it meant to be faithful to Jesus Christ in complicated times. If you can only read one of his books, I would recommend the Letters and Papers. In the “dailyness” and loneliness and frustration of his prison experience, after having been arrested for participation in a plot to assassinate Hitler, you see in his letters the profundity and the integrity of his faith.

Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars

This classic on the morality of war is especially relevant once again in our times. Walzer is masterful at helping us wrestle with the classic dilemmas associated with making violence an instrument of justice and moral vision. Whether we ultimately end up identifying more with the historic Christian traditions of Pacifism or Just War, Walzer's book will help us become more sensitive to the complexities of wielding the sword in God's name.

George Eliot's Middlemarch

Mary Anne Evans grew up in an evangelical home in Victorian England. Her novels reflect her lifelong struggle with the categories of faith and morality that were part of her upbringing both at home and in the surrounding 19th century middle class culture. I have enjoyed over the years a number of her novels, Adam Bede, Romola, Mill on the Floss, and Daniel Deronda. But my favorite is Middlemarch. I am at a loss to fully explain this, except to say that in this novel, Eliot draws us compellingly into the struggle of what it means to live life with integrity and depth—learning to be loyal to ourselves, to our community, and ultimately to God.

David Newsome, The Parting of Friends

This book traces the friendships of several students at Oxford during the early Victorian period—and the ways in which their friendships were shaped by their personal struggles of faith. These young men had all grown up in “evangelical” homes, as the early 19th century used that word. (They were in the Anglican church, but very committed to a strong personal faith that also manifested itself in bringing about social change. William Wilberforce, the hero of Amazing Grace, would have been in this camp. In fact, three of the “friends” of this book were his sons.) At Oxford, they confronted the teaching of faculty members who were being drawn to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. The book is a theological “coming of age” story—made more poignant by the ways in which each person's journey of faith intertwined with relationships to friends, mentors, and parents. It is a powerful book about “making one's faith one's own” and doing this with integrity while also in the context of community.

John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University

Though far removed in certain respects from Christian liberal arts education at the beginning of the 21st century, this classic Victorian work still invites us better than any other single volume I know to the challenges of doing Christian liberal arts education with excellence.

I end by recommending to you several of my favorite poets—George Herbert (17th-century England), R.S. Thomas (20th-century Wales), and Gerard Manley Hopkins (late-19th/early-20th century England).

This page is a list of ten books that have had a profound effect on me at various points in my life. That is all that brings them together. They come from different stages in my life—but all meet the test for me of a good book. It is one that I would go back and read again! I will add to this list from time to time—both more “classics” from my own life, but also books that I have found helpful in this stage of my journey.

President Mullen, February 2008