Here are 100 books that This Life fans have personally recommended if you like
This Life.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I'm an artist, activist, and social entrepreneur. Latino bilingüe and history nerd. I’m the Founder of Resilient Coders, a free and stipended nonprofit coding bootcamp that trains people of color for careers as software engineers. I built that organization for the same reason I write: I care about the economic wellness of Black and Latinx people. I want my neighbors to have the purchasing power to keep my local bodega open. They carry my coffee. Whole Foods doesn’t.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire makes claims so bold, and so revolutionary, that the book was banned in much of the Global South during the era of dictatorships in the 70s.
One of the central ideas was this: The oppressed are as capable and as intelligent as their oppressors. They need not be treated as requiring “help” or “guidance,” which are dynamics that can lend themselves to inequitable power constructs.
This worldview, in which one group of people is needed in order to “save” another group of people, is the intellectual foundation from which we’ve built systems of oppression throughout history. If one person’s liberation is dependent on another person’s choice, they can never be equals.
This is the book upon which we built Resilient Coders.
First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. Paulo Freire's work has helped to empower countless people throughout the world and has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is ongoing.
This 50th anniversary edition includes an updated introduction by Donaldo Macedo, a new afterword by Ira Shor and interviews with Marina Aparicio Barberan, Noam Chomsky, Ramon Flecha, Gustavo Fischman, Ronald David Glass, Valerie Kinloch, Peter Mayo, Peter McLaren…
As a child, it was shocking to observe prejudice and bullying. I wanted with all my being to resist, to make things right. I trust that in this I am not alone. Juxtaposed, I remember instances of compassion and still feel grateful. My oldest brother Luke helped me think deeply about these kinds of events. In response, I dedicated myself to a career in music and arts in education. I felt blessed to bring students from different cultures together to build creativity, understanding, and community. I wanted to empower young people to voice their feelings and thoughts in the poetry, stories, and plays they wrote, set to music, and performed.
What are the true costs of racism and the benefits of breaking out of its cage? I deeply admire the way Heather McGhee mines evidence and shows how the construction of race has worked against the interests of everyone, regardless of race. Then, she flips the script and shows compelling evidence for all the ways that we as a people benefit by working together. She calls it the ‘Solidarity Dividend,’ and I love this term she has coined.
She gives living examples of how everyone benefits when we work together to move beyond the zero-sum game, whether in the fields of healthcare, education, housing, employment, voting rights, the safety net, or more. Data-driven but in a refreshing style, McGhee’s book is inspiring!
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • One of today’s most insightful and influential thinkers offers a powerful exploration of inequality and the lesson that generations of Americans have failed to learn: Racism has a cost for everyone—not just for people of color.
WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, The Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ms. magazine, BookRiot, Library Journal
“This is the book I’ve been waiting for.”—Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist
I'm an artist, activist, and social entrepreneur. Latino bilingüe and history nerd. I’m the Founder of Resilient Coders, a free and stipended nonprofit coding bootcamp that trains people of color for careers as software engineers. I built that organization for the same reason I write: I care about the economic wellness of Black and Latinx people. I want my neighbors to have the purchasing power to keep my local bodega open. They carry my coffee. Whole Foods doesn’t.
We don’t learn African American history in this country, nor do we learn anything about our economic history. (Imagine how much better we’d understand our country if we did.)
This book presents cooperatives as the act of resistance that they in fact are, and offers a strong rebuke to the argument that cooperatives are a European phenomenon too far removed from our own national experience to take root here. Not only has cooperative thought taken root here, those roots have sprouted whole forests.
For those of us struggling to find in our history economic models from which we can build a more equitable and inclusive future, this book is a must.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and…
Since 2008, I have conducted research on themes related to International Political Economy. I am currently the co-chair of the research committee on this topic at the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and am passionate about making sense of the interplay between material and symbolic factors that shape capitalism and globalisation. Being based in Brazil, I was stuck when the country—which did not have salient identity cleavages in politics—came to be, after 2008, a hotspot of religious-based right-wing populism associated with the defence of trade liberalisation as globalisation started to face meaningful backlash from White-majority constituencies who are relatively losers of the post-Cold War order in the advanced industrialised democracies.
I love the way he explores the interplay between economic ideas and political institutions that culminated in the triumph of market forces in the aftermath of the Cold War. Yet, Gerstle’s most interesting insights lie at the end of the book as he classifies Trump and Modi as ethnonationalist leaders of the same feather as China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Globalisation, however, has not necessarily reached its end, as it may simply be reframed to fit a world whose shape has yet to be defined.
Best Books of 2022: Financial Times Best Non-Fiction Books of 2022: De Tijd Shortlisted for Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year
The most sweeping account of how neoliberalism came to dominate American politics for nearly a half century before crashing against the forces of Trumpism on the right and a new progressivism on the left.
The epochal shift toward neoliberalism-a web of related policies that, broadly speaking, reduced the footprint of government in society and reassigned economic power to private market forces-that began in the United States and Great Britain in the late 1970s fundamentally changed the world.…
I am an award-winning historian and philosopher of the human sciences. But I got here by means of an unusually varied path: working for a private investigator, practicing in a Buddhist monastery, being shot at, hiking a volcano off the coast of Africa, being jumped by a gang in Amsterdam, snowboarding in the Pyrenees, piloting a boat down the canals of Bourgogne, playing bass guitar in a punk band, and once I almost died from scarlet fever. Throughout my journey, I have lived and studied in five countries, acquired ten languages, and attended renowned universities (Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford), all while seeking ways to make the world a better place.
In this book, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor challenges the notion that modernization automatically leads to secularization.
Instead of viewing modernity as either the decline of religion or subtraction of religion from public life, Taylor presents the idea that modernity brings about the expansion and variety of religious beliefs. In Taylor’s view Christianity has been relativized insofar as it has been rendered but one kind of belief among others.
He also argues that many transcendent values have been replaced by immanent concerns. But in certain important ways the book is still hopeful. It is a very long text, but it is definitely important reading for anyone navigating faith, spirituality, and the search for meaning in today’s world.
What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean--of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.
I have long been passionate about helping people connect with God through their work. After graduating from college, I worked in full-time minister for six years and then became an entrepreneur. Was I dropping off a spiritual cliff by leaving full-time ministry? I later pursued my PhD and became a professor. At the University of Oklahoma, I became a top researcher and co-founded the Center for Entrepreneurship. The impact of work on my faith has long been an important issue for me. I ultimately gained valuable insights from God that enhanced my spiritual journey. In my book, I explain the profound significance of work for knowing God.
This book does a phenomenal job of building on a biblical foundation to help readers see the relevance of their work to God and their spiritual journey. I love how this book helps me develop strategies for positioning my work to build an eternal legacy.
Jordan Raynor also helped me to see how my view of work can offer important insights about heaven. I feel affirmed in my career and the significant value it can bring to the kingdom of God.
From a leading voice in the faith and work movement and author of Redeeming Your Time comes the revolutionary message that God sees our daily work—in whatever form it takes—with far more value than we ever imagined.
“The Sacredness of Secular Work does an extraordinary job of being both personally relevant and, more importantly, biblically faithful.”—Randy Alcorn, New York Times bestselling author of Heaven
Does your work matter for eternity?
Sadly, most believers don’t think so. Sure, the 1 percent of the time they spend sharing the gospel with their co-workers matters. But most Christians view the other 99 percent…
I’m a recovering atheist: a Christian convert who has more sympathy with some of my former atheist brethren than with a lot of my fellow believers. And I’m a historian by trade, which means I believe in the importance of trying to get inside the heads of people living in very different times – but who were still people. I’ve chosen polemical books by atheists and by believers, but in my own writing I try to get sympathetically inside the heads of both. I find that I get on better if I listen to the other side rather than banging the drum for my own – whichever ‘my own side’ is.
Callum Brown is a card-carrying humanist and one of the greatest (and most combative) historians of modern secularism. This book’s concept is very simple: he’s conducted 85 in-depth interviews with self-identified atheists in Europe and the United States about how they got that way, how they understand their world and construct their values, and how they relate to the religions that some of them used to embrace. I think his celebration of these good people blinds him to the very particular historical processes at work here, but I challenge anyone to read this book and not acknowledge that our world has profoundly changed in the past half-century.
The Western World is becoming atheist. In the space of three generations churchgoing and religious belief have become alien to millions. We are in the midst of one of humankind's great cultural changes. How has this happened?
Becoming Atheist explores how people of the sixties' generation have come to live their lives as if there is no God. It tells the life narratives of those from Britain, Western Europe, the United States and Canada who came from Christian, Jewish and other backgrounds to be without faith. Based on interviews with 85 people born in 18 countries, Callum Brown shows how…
I’ve been a liberal all my life: I went to my first protest march by myself when I was 13 and cast my first vote for George McGovern. I’ve also been an academic most of my life, studying and teaching at multiple colleges and universities. Over the last decade I’ve watched the animating principles of both academia and liberalism – the spirit of free inquiry and the willingness to debate ideas – descend into an authoritarian conformism that brooks no dissent. I hope that these books can persuade people to fight against these trends before it’s too late: “Do not go gentle into that good night; Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”
Like Stone’s book, this is a book about history, not wokeness. It’s not an easy read, but it’s worth the effort.
It recounts the triumph of scientific reasoning and liberal tolerance over several decades in the mid-twentieth century. That triumph was largely brought about by the “secularization” of American culture, spearheaded by Jewish intellectuals.
I read it long before wokeness was a thing – it was published in 1996 – and found it interesting but not particularly relevant to anything I was thinking about. But when wokeness came along, it suddenly hit me that this new religion was taking us backwards, back to the beginning of Hollinger’s story.
If that trend continues, we are in danger of losing the gains that science and tolerance have produced.
This remarkable group of essays described the "culture wars" that consolidated a new, secular ethos in mid-twentieth-century American academia and generated the fresh energies needed for a wide range of scientific and cultural enter-prises. Focusing on the decades from the 1930s through the 1960s, David Hollinger discusses the scientists, social scientists, philosophers, and historians who fought the Christian biases that had kept Jews from fully participating in American intellectual life. Today social critics take for granted the comparatively open outlook developed by these men (and men they were, mostly), and charge that their cosmopolitanism was not sufficiently multicultural. Yet Hollinger…
I moved to the University of Notre Dame in 1997 because I fell in love with its distinctive vision, including its core mission as a Catholic university. A year later I became dean. When during interviews I asked prospective faculty members how they might contribute to the distinctive mission of Notre Dame, broadly understood, I realized that they did not really understand what a Catholic university was, so I gave them my own understanding of Notre Dame and of the idea of a Catholic university. Eventually, I turned my oral answer into a short book, which articulates that vision in ways that should inspire anyone, whether they are Catholic or not.
Robert Benne interviewed me for his book, which offers case studies of several different kinds of religious universities. You know the interview is conducted well, when the person asking the questions is forcing you to think anew about your own implementation of vision.
Benne asked me how we socialize faculty into our distinctive vision. I immediately sensed that we did not do enough and addressed the issue more fully both in practice and in one of my books.
At a Catholic university, one should also think about how other kinds of religious universities define and realize their mission. This book accomplishes that.
This book demonstrates that, despite much evidence to the contrary, there are still Christian colleges and universities of high academic quality that have also kept their religious heritages publicly relevant. Respected scholar Robert Benne explores how six schools from six different religious traditions (Calvin College, Wheaton College, St. Olaf College, Valparaiso University, Baylor University, and the University of Notre Dame) have maintained "quality with soul". These constructive case studies examine the vision, ethos, and personnel policies of each school, showing how 'and why' its religious foundation remains strong.
My interest in demography began when I saw rapid demographic change taking place before my eyes in London, and when I noted the different fertility choices of friends and relations and started to put the pieces together and to understand how demography shapes our changing reality. I have published three books on the subject—the first, a version of my PhD thesis, the second and third captured below—and have broadcast and written articles for the press extensively on these topics.
Eric was my PhD supervisor and was finishing the book as I began my thesis. This gave me a chance to have an insight into the thinking and the process behind the book’s creation as well as an opportunity to read the manuscript. Combining serious analysis of the data with an astute and observative reading of big global trends, this book sets out one of the most important trends underway today—the burgeoning numbers in strict, world-denying bearing a large number of children and able to hang onto them. A decade on, as secular birth rates plummet, the thesis is more valid than ever.
Dawkins and Hitchens have convinced many western intellectuals that secularism is the way forward. But most people don't read their books before deciding whether to be religious. Instead, they inherit their faith from their parents, who often innoculate them against the elegant arguments of secularists. And what no one has noticed is that far from declining, the religious are expanding their share of the population: in fact, the more religious people are, the more children they have. The cumulative effect of immigration from religious countries, and religious fertility will be to reverse the secularisation process in the West. Not only…
