Fans pick 100 books like The Afterlife in Early Christian Carthage

This is the most comprehensive book on Native American afterlife beliefs ever written.

What makes it especially interesting is that the author focuses on myths and legends of afterlife journeys – what he called “Orpheus myths.” He looks at them from many perspectives – historical and cultural – but most importantly experiential.

Writing almost 20 years before the popularization of near-death experiences in the Western world, Hultkrantz identified NDEs as a different type of experience from dreams or shamanic visions – and found that indigenous people did, too.

He also suggested that such experiences contributed to afterlife beliefs – that is, that they weren’t simply culturally created “stories” or hallucinations. Readable and entertaining as well as scholarly, it’s wonderful that this book is back in print after languishing in obscurity for decades!

Wondrous Events is one the best books on the “experiential source hypothesis” – a term coined by David Hufford that describes how apparently “paranormal” experiences lead to the formation of new “supernatural,” religious, or folk beliefs.

McClenon, a sociologist, saw the importance of looking at the evidence for this hypothesis across cultures, taking in historical and modern cases in China, Japan, and elsewhere.

Rather than focusing on one particular type of experience, he hones in on the dynamics of how extraordinary experiences are interpreted in cultural terms and integrated into beliefs systems. Along the way he discusses NDEs and out-of-body experiences, apparitions, ESP, sleep paralysis, psychokinesis, poltergeists, spiritual healing, and more.

Written within a concise, clear, and authoritative style, the book is a model of how scholarly wring can appeal to mainstream readers.

This long-lost early book on near-death experiences was written around the same time as Raymond Moody’s classic Life After Life, but totally independent of any knowledge of that more famous work.

Hampe was a German philosopher, and while the book made a huge splash in Germany it’s practically unknown to the English-speaking world, even though an excellent translation was published in the 1970s (finally now reprinted).

Hampe is a deep thinker though has a very engaging style. Knowing that he had his own NDE makes the book poignant and moving to read. What I find most interesting about it is the very different approach he took compared to Moody.

Rather than looking at the phenomenon as a scientific puzzle and focusing on the possibility that NDEs are evidence for an afterlife, Hampe was interested in their metaphysical implications. 

Alan Gauld has set a new standard in the historical study of psychical research with this new in-depth examination of the history of mediumship.

Impeccably researched and with extensive use of unpublished sources, it’s also written with an engaging combination of erudition and subtle wit. Gauld brings his subjects to life in a way that gives readers a more immediate, personal glimpse of the mediums, the researchers, and their world.

He is always critical but objective when weighing the debate for and against genuine communication from souls of the dead, without flinching from considering either evidence of fraud or apparently veridical phenomena.

What I find especially satisfying is the way the book deals not only with the question of survival, but also the social history of mediumship and associated attitudes towards death and the afterlife.

The year 381 marked the point at which the new Roman emperor, Theodosius, convened the Church council that outlawed Arianism and made Jesus’ role as God incarnate, the Second Person of the Trinity, an essential part of Christian orthodoxy. For the historian Charles Freeman, this noxious combination of secular and ecclesiastical power stands as the origin of the development he described earlier in The Closing of the Western Mind (Anchor, 2005). Freeman’s analysis of the “Greek-ification” of Christian thinking is very sharp, and he tells the story of Theodosius well, even if he sometimes seems to be reading elements of modern dictatorial leadership back into that emperor’s character. A stimulating, provocative read. 

This book explores post-Reformation attitudes to the medieval past, which was continuously debated and rewritten according to the shifting religious landscape of the sixteenth century and beyond.

Helen Parish’s work helped me to see the merits and benefits of crossing the rather arbitrary divide between the medieval and early modern periods, since it so deftly places medieval and Reformation sources in dialogue.

Her book also makes fascinating reading for anyone wanting to better understand reformed Protestantism as a culture of adaptation and accommodation, as much as of destruction and the outright rejection of the Catholic past. 

In this lively and knowledgeable history of Christian controversies of the fifth century CE, Philip Jenkins produces a valuable and colorful sequel to the story told in When Jesus Became God. This book reveals what happened after the Council of Constantinople adopted a Trinitarian view of Jesus and Roman power shifted to the Byzantine East. The council “settled” the Arian controversy for the time being but generated an even more ferocious series of battles over Jesus’ divine/human nature and the relationship of Christianity to Greek thought. As the book’s subtitle suggests, Jenkins has a fine time showing how an admixture of imperial politics, Church politics, and theological ideas created “orthodox” Christian thought and practice. 

This book is quickly becoming a classic in the faith and work area. For me personally, it offered a solid Biblical foundation for my thinking on the goodness of work, the Creation Mandate, and the Doctrine of Vocation.

I particularly appreciated the chapter on the dignity of work, where Keller outlines the value of work for all human beings regardless of their status and pay. We are also free to seek work that aligns with our gifts and passions.

Finally, Keller discusses the impact of the Fall on our work in a very refreshing way. I appreciate this book because it gives us solid reasons to strive for skill and patience in our places of work. 

This is a wonderfully mind-expanding book which gently takes the history of philosophy that you think you know and turns it on its head. Most of the great critics of Christianity – Spinoza, Voltaire, Tom Paine, they’re all here – were not really, it turns out, atheists trying to tear it all up: they were idealistic, reforming believers who weren’t satisfied with churchy orthodoxies and wanted to purify religions that they thought had become corrupted. That made them maybe even fiercer in their criticisms, and it certainly meant they had unleashed forces they couldn’t control. But it means the moral force that drove anti-religious criticism during the Enlightenment was the desire, not to destroy religion, but to perfect it.

All who are convinced that the Middle Ages was a barbaric period in which emotions were on the whole angry and violent will quickly change their mind as soon as they pick up this book. It shows that, far from being a stagnant interlude between the richly emotional worlds of classical antiquity and our own age, the period we call the Middle Ages was in constant emotional ferment, drawing above all on the implications of Christ’s passion and what it meant for human sensibilities.