The Meaning of Marriage
Family, State, Market, and Morals
A thorough discussion of the case for marriage as an intrinsically good institution.By Jean Bethke Elshtain, et al
(Spence Publishing Company, 2006)
Category: Other Recommendations
The Fragrance of God
Further meditations on gardening. Vigen Guroian explores bitter losses and blessings of life through the lens of his own life as he and his family move from Maryland to a new home near the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.By Vigen Guroian
(Eerdmans, 2006)
[Details]
Is There a Culture War?
A Dialogue on Values and American Public Life
James Davison Hunter and Alan Wolfe join in dialogue to search for the truth about America's cultural condition.By James Davison Hunter and Alan Wolfe, eds.
(Brookings Institution Press, 2006)
[Details]
The Civil War as a Theological Crisis
A historical discussion of the role scriptural interpretation and church authority structures played in the arguments over slavery and the Civil War.By Mark A. Noll
(The University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
[Details]
The Great Omission
Dallas Willard challenges the thought that we can be Christians without being disciples and calls on believers to restore what should be the heart of Christianity—being active disciples of Jesus Christ.By Dallas Willard
(Monarch Books, 2006)
[Details]
Invitation to the Classics
A Guide to Books You've Always Wanted to Read
By Os Guinness and Louise Cowan, editors
(Baker Books, 2006)
A paperback edition of our acclaimed guide to literature.
Fifty brief essays by a number of respected Christian literary scholars that extend invitations to readers to experience anew or for the first time the wonder and the beauty of selected classics. Each essay contains a biographical and historical sketch, a summary of the work being considered, suggestions and bibliographies for further study and questions raised by the text about the interaction of Christian faith and society. Also includes other essays on different genres.
384 pages. Hardcover edition published in 1998.
[Details]
News from Somewhere
On Settling
Collected essays from Scruton’s weekly articles in the Financial Times on country matters.By Roger Scruton
(Continuum, 2006)
Always beautifully written, one of these pieces (Vegetables) won the 2002 prize from The Queen’s English Society for the best piece of prose writing of the year.
177 pages
[Details]
Gentle Regrets
Thoughts from a Life
A quiet, witty but also serious and moving account of the ways in which life has brought Scruton to think what he thinks, and to be who he is.By Roger Scruton
(Continuum, 2006)
His moving vignettes of his childhood and later influences illuminate this book.
248 pages, paper.
[Details]
Porridge and Passion
By Jonathan Aitken
(Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006)
In this sequel to his first volume of autobiography, Pride and Perjury, Aitken starts his story as he is taken down from the courtroom and incarcerated at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.
How this Old Etonian former Cabinet Minister on Mrs Thatcher’s inner circle managed to establish new relationships and lasting friendships with fellow prisoners is fascinating—so too is this account of how religious belief transformed his life. Aitken has lost none of his charm, fluency, and determination—and he has found an authentic new life which readers of this entertaining new book will be able to judge for themselves.
[Details]
Heroes and Contemporaries
A series of profiles of leading figures and their strengths and flaws following the model of Winston Churchill's "Great Contemporaries."By Jonathan Aitken
(Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006)
[Details]
Joy Cometh in the Morning
By P. G. Wodehouse
Foreword by Joseph Bottum
(2005)
Read this one for some perspective on what’s important in life—or better, read it for sheer enjoyment.
This edition of The Trinity Forum Reading features “Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend,” a short story by P. G. Wodehouse with a Foreword by Joseph Bottum, editor of the journal First Things.
“Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend” gives us a taste of a world that never quite existed—but should have. Bottum, in his Foreword, suggests something about the power of Wodehouse’s light but perfectly crafted words, thrown in the teeth of the waste land that was the twentieth century, and claims that Wodehouse is Western civilization’s best answer to Friedrich Nietzsche.
[Details]
The Gospel of Wealth
By Andrew Carnegie
Foreword by Alonzo L. McDonald
(2005)Download a PDF version of this Reading (396K) (See note below)
Have a print copy? Download the PDF Group Discussion Guide here.
Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” offers his vision for philanthropy, opening a window into a turbulent time and raising questions still worth pondering by people of means and people of faith alike. The Foreword by Alonzo L. McDonald provides a comprehensive historical setting for this influential essay.
In the days of the “robber barons” before the U.S. income tax was instituted, one man stood out from his peers for adding to business savvy a real core of personal integrity and idealism. Andrew Carnegie, immigrant, self-made man, corporate tycoon, and pioneering philanthropist, had a clear vision for philanthropy that he carried out in his own life and with his own money. By the time he died, he had given away all his wealth—much of it personally, some of it to his foundations.
“The problem of our age,” Carnegie writes, “is the proper administration of wealth.” The mutual resentment between rich and poor, he suggests, can only be ameliorated if those who accumulate wealth also themselves distribute it to the benefit of society. It is a uniquely American vision that draws both on Carnegie’s Christian upbringing and his later Social Darwinist views and also bears the highly personal stamp of his rise from extreme poverty to the highest stratum of the ladder of worldly success.
[Details]
Revelation
By Flannery O'Connor
Foreword by Louise S. Cowan
(2005)
“Revelation” is a very funny—and moving—story and a great introduction to the work of Flannery O’Connor, who is increasingly considered one of the best short story writers of the twentieth century.
This selection has a Foreword by Dr. Louise S. Cowan. A founder of the University of Dallas, former Trinity Forum Moderator, and co-editor of our Invitation to the Classics, she is a nationally recognized expert on O’Connor and the Southern literary tradition.
Dr. Cowan introduces O’Connor and her comedy of the grotesque and sets her in historical and literary context. “The true grotesque,” she writes, which O’Connor intended to be taken seriously, “sheds a strange light on ordinary reality and thus proves highly shocking to our secular sensibilities.”
Another insight that O’Connor developed and Dr. Cowan explains is that the grotesque “expresses the Christian’s paradoxical plight of being in the world but not of it. As O’Connor herself has commented, not only evil, but also the good, is grotesque, since the good is ‘under construction.’”
As for “Revelation,” the short story reprinted here, it is a masterpiece of comic literature. Ruby Turpin, the protagonist, is a good, respectable, self-satisfied, hard-working woman who loves Jesus. In the person of the ugly girl Mary Grace, Jesus hammers home a message to Mrs. Turpin—and us too—about virtue, self-identity, judgment, and grace.
[Details]
Unspeakable
Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror
By Os Guinness
(HarperOne, 2005)
[Details]
Not Just Science
Questions Where Christian Faith and Natural Science Intersect
A look at the questions students should be asking as they study the natural sciences in relation to the Christian worldview and think critically about God's creation.By E. David Cook
(Zondervan, 2005)
[Details]
