Five Books I Read in 2019

Here are the five best books I read this year:

That All Shall Be Saved

– David Bentley Hart

A blistering critique of the belief that some will suffer eternal concious torment in the afterlife, which the author openly attacks as absurd folly. A rather telling quote, which is both a ludicrous description of what evangelism ought to be and a perfectly accurate depiction of what it is in so many cases:

for many Christians down the years, the rationale of evangelization has been a desperate race to save as many souls as possible from God

Throughout the book, he refuses to pull punches against views he regards as slander against a loving God.

Eating Animals

– Jonathan Safran Foer

I read this book on the recommendation of a very good friend who is a vegetarian. I have for some time had misgivings about the ethics of paying people to slaughter animals that I would not be willing to kill myself. Reading this book, however, I learned that the (hopefully) relatively short time in the animal's life that I had been focused on was perhaps a smaller ethical concern than how the animal lived the rest of its life. By detailing the common practices of an industry with no god but the Invisible Hand of the Free Market, it is difficult to remain untroubled by the compromises which lead to allowing animals to suffer for their entire lives so that corporations can minimize costs.

The Universal Christ

– Richard Rohr

In this book, Rohr simply and graciously advocates for an inclusivity with universal reach because of the universal nature of God. He also talks about something which troubles me a bit: why are so many people who aren't Christians still seem to bear the fruit of Christianity?

We must be honest and humble about this: Many people of other faiths, like Sufi masters, Jewish prophets, many philosophers, and Hindu mystics, have lived in light of the Divine encounter better than many Christians.

The Spy and the Traitor

– Ben Macintyre

A true story that reads like something out of a John le Carré novel. At the height of the Cold War, a KGB agent named Oleg Gordievsky reached out to MI6 and became a double agent. I'm a huge fan of these Cold War slow burning spy stories.

To Have or To Be

– Erich Fromm

There is a commercial for a website that sells doodads like a magnetic computerized chess board or a levitating record player that has the tag line “Sometimes things aren't just things; they're you.” A critique of this sort of mindless capitalistic consumerism, this book is just as relevant now as when it was first published nearly 45 years ago:

The failure of the Great Promise, aside from industrialism’s essential economic contradictions, was built into the industrial system by its two main psychological premises: (1) that the aim of life is happiness, that is, maximum pleasure, defined as the satisfaction of any desire or subjective need a person may feel (radical hedonism); (2) that egotism, selfishness, and greed, as the system needs to generate them in order to function, lead to harmony and peace.

Hoping to read and write more in the year to come!