100 books like Dissident Daughters

I don’t always agree with Bart Ehrman, but I do here. Forgeries, heresies, martyrs, even unfamiliar texts featuring women (who was Thecla and why was she hanging around with Paul?) contribute to an engaging read.

Whereas MacCulloch provides the “big picture” of Christian history, Ehrman targets the first centuries of Christianity—those centuries so critical to current debates about gender and lay roles in churches—to help us understand what we don’t understand about holy texts, especially ones that never made it into Christian Bible.

Ehrman takes us into the thought processes of early Church communities to help us see how Christians made decisions that shaped church policies relevant to gendered and lay leadership today.

Cooke makes us question what we think we know about gender.

MacCulloch makes us rethink what we think we know about Christianity. There are so many books of Christian history on the market it can be overwhelming. Many have social, theological, or political agendas. Not MacCulloch. A scholar of the first tier, MacCulloch unpacks Christianity, but this is no textbook.

With clarity and readability, MacCulloch rejects traditional Eurocentric narratives to explore Syriac churches, Thomist Christians in India, Orthodoxy, and the oft-forgotten Church of the East. He emphasizes how the strength of Christianity in all its different forms hasn’t been its supposedly unchanging nature but its adaptability—an important lesson to take into discussions of gender, lay roles, and religion.

Cooke’s hilarious, spot-on exploration of how we humans create our understandings of female nature and capabilities may seem an odd starting point, but bear with me.

Cooke exposes how scientists and scholars for centuries have mis-reported and normalized views about males and females that have little to do with actual science and much to do with the gendered attitudes of the scientists. We all have presumptions about gender roles we don’t question.

But to explore the intersections of gender and faith we need to become aware of our pre-conceptions and how we got them. From Dick the sage grouse to elder female leadership within orca pods, you’ll be laughing while gob-smacked at the shaky biological foundation of many of our gender presumptions about what is “natural” for males and females.

So many Christian churches struggle over who ought to lead. Do female priests/pastors fulfill or discount God’s intentions? How does one know? Scripture? Tradition?

Macy digs into the long-term history and finds that women were clearly ordained in the early church, but evidence of that ordination has been erased or explained away. Women used to perform many duties that we associate with religious leadership today, including some sacraments.

Furthermore, some were ordained, receiving vestments, staffs, and mitres. Their gradual exclusion from their traditional roles happened over centuries and was virtually complete by the 13th century, as the Church redefined ordination in ways that excluded women and their ministries.

Then we rewrote the history to make it appear women had never been ordained. Again, no agenda here—just the history.

I'm recommending this book because just—wow. Almost a thousand pages of articles that are feminist in their biblical interpretation. Pity this didn't exist in the late 1980s when I wrote my own book. (It was published in 2012.) (Actually, better that it didn't exist back then—I might not have seen the need for my own modest contribution to the field!)

If scholars are still trying to completely understand the Bible, how are we supposed to navigate it?

Inspired steps back and takes a look at Scripture, inviting us to ask questions and know it better, from both a spiritual and literary perspective. While I didn’t agree with everything the author suggests, everything made me pause and think. It’s a rare book that both challenges and encourages, but this one most certainly does both.

There is a misconception that reading Buddhist scripture would somehow steer the reader away from God, but given the chance, it does exactly the opposite, actually strengthening the reader's existing faith (whatever it may be). Many of the people who attend my public talks, discussions, and Q&A’s, jokingly refer to themselves as “Recovering Catholics” in search of deeper meaning, and this book beautifully bridges the gap between traditions, highlighting how compatible the two practices can be with one another.  

Etienne Gilson was the leading intellectual historian of the medieval Church in France, and this is the clearest, most lucid exposition of St. Thomas Aquinas’s thinking that I have read. Perhaps because the Roman Catholic Church has often used Aquinas’s thinking to justify conservative positions, we often forget that he was a world-class genius who radicalized religious and ethical thought in the Middle Ages, and whose work helped inspire later movements of reform like the Vatican II Council. Gilson’s sympathetic treatment of Aquinas restored this understanding of his thinking and helped produce the modern neo-Thomist movement. It is worth reading – and it is readable!

With the powerful use of language, this book explains how everyone in this world is born for a purpose. There are 40 chapters in the book required to be read over 40 days’ time. I like the concept of reading one chapter a day and reflecting on the knowledge before applying it. The message of the book is to keep God at the center of your life in order to fulfill your true purpose.

While most of us won’t suddenly move from being homeschooled in an African village to attending a huge high school in California, readers can learn so much from Katie!

If you love books that emphasize strong families and congenial characters who face relevant issues, you’ll love Faith Under Pressure.

I was inspired by the respect within Katie’s family, her desire to bloom where she’s planted, and her commitment to start a Christian club at school.

When agreeing to tutor a bully threatens her new friendships, Katie faces a new level of anxiety, and her faith will be tested like never before.