The best books on Christian apologetics

Lewis’s classic is the most popular and influential defense of Christian belief published in the last 100 years. It is cited more often than any other book, particularly among scientists, philosophers, and other thoughtful people as important to them on their journey to the Christian faith. It’s a little dated now—the gap between Lewis and ourselves stretches wider each year—but it’s still compelling.

The anti-John Gray – and, in purely literary terms, the best writer on my list, which is saying something. It’s not, Francis Spufford says, an apologetic, a reasoned defence of faith. It’s a personal account of why his Christianity makes emotional sense to him, and why it might make emotional sense to other people too. Worth reading for his retelling of the life of Jesus alone. He doesn’t deal with the intellectual questions of religion vs. atheism (though he has some sly hints). What he does is explain why you might want to deal with those questions. So it’s an ‘unapologetic’: both, because it’s about emotion and not narrow reason, and also, he says, because he’s not sorry. Read it, and you won’t be either.

If, like me, you want to fall in love with a book’s characters and then stick with them for an entire series, and you feel like a story just isn’t complete without some romantic and/or sexual tension woven through, then I think you may enjoy this one as much as I did. Each book follows Amaranthe Lockdon and one other of the main characters, so you really get to know them well. I love how the books are structured. And Sicarius is a dangerous and compelling love interest.