Eusebius, Early Christianity’s Historian
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“Essentially, Eusebius gathered up the entire first three centuries of the faith and packaged them in his History, a book that still affords stimulating reading.” - Imaginative Conservative
Beyond Efficiency: The Cost of Outsourcing Our Thinking
Last semester, one of my friends, who adjuncts at a local college, told a story about how he pulled one of his students aside after reading an essay that didn’t quite sound like him. The tone seemed too polished and robotic. The structure came across symmetrically predictable. It eventually came out that the young man had used AI to write the paper. But that wasn’t the part that blew up my brain.
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Reading Isn’t “Dead”: Text Is (Still) King
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“The hot new theory online is that reading is kaput…. We are careening toward a post-literate society, where myth, intuition, and emotion replace logic, evidence, and science. Nobody needs to bomb us back to the Stone Age; we have decided to walk there ourselves. I am skeptical of this thesis.” - Persuasion
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To Foster Biblical Literacy, Teach People to Read
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“Only a familiarity with books of all sorts enables students to pick up on the clues about what an author is doing and how he’s doing it. They need to read—a lot. To foster biblical literacy, we need to foster literacy in general.” - TGC
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Editor’s Pick: 6 Books on Christian Apologetics
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“Amid this flood of solid resources, these six recently published books on apologetics can help renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel.” - TGC
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To Read Is Human
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“We are what we read, shaped intellectually and spiritually and relationally over the course of a lifetime…. we are formed even by books we merely heard of and have an inkling about their contents. As they marinate in our memory for years and decades, these books become part of our own invisible inner libraries.” - Providence
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Disturbing but Worth It: Getting Outside Our Bubble
In seminary we were encouraged—well, required—to read outside our own theological perspective. A few students recoiled a bit. They had been living in a bubble, and those outside it had been mostly ignored, sometimes caricatured, but never directly listened to with the goal of accurate understanding.
Most students relished the wider reading. They’d already learned that curiosity, personal connection, and questioning assumptions can result in life-changing bursts of discovery and personal growth.
… which is why effective educational institutions do that sort of thing.
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Read Books, Not AI Summaries of Books
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“Why not ‘read’ more books by leaning on AI’s synthesizing prowess, gaining knowledge more efficiently? Because it’s a bad trade. It’s like swapping a feast for fast food.” - TGC
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7 non-ministry books every pastor should read
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“like anything else, ministry-related reading can become a bubble, within which expanded thinking is impossible….More than a decade ago, then still in full-time pastoral ministry, I shifted my reading to include more ‘regular’ history, biographies of not-necessarily-Christian people, fiction, science, and more.” - Baptist Press
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The Pilgrim’s Progress: It was written in prison. It has never been out of print since its first publication in 1678.
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“For all its strict view of perseverance, Bunyan manages to pastorally describe meditation on the Word, trusting in God’s promises, the power of prayer, fleeing temptation, living by grace, maintaining spiritual disciplines and ultimately leaning on the sustaining grace of God that is the ground and cause of it all.” - Churches Without Chests
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