I love historical fiction in all its forms, from the multi-volume family epics to the Dear America middle-grade books I grew up with. And I really, truly don’t understand why historical fiction has a reputation for being dry, dull, or worst of all, like homework. Sure, there are some novels written for history buffs only, but the vast majority aren’t, and neither is mine. When I wrote A Tip for the Hangman, my goal was to write historical fiction that reads like a page-turner, not a textbook. The books on this list all pull off that trick beautifully, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Mysterious victorian missionaries with dark secrets in the land of the fae.I truly do not know how to sell this book any better. I tend to recommend gothic literature for historical fiction newbies, since the emotional stakes are always so high and the plots often bend close to horror or fantasy, and this one is no different. The worldbuilding is spectacular, and it plays on the tropes of classic gothic novels in a way that’s knowing, clever, and never dry or stilted. No wonder Ng won the Hugo for best new author when she released this book—it deserves it.
Winner of the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Jeannette Ng brings a stunningly different Victorian fantasy that mixes Crimson Peak with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
Victorian missionaries travel into the heart of the newly discovered lands of the Fae, in a stunningly different fantasy that mixes Crimson Peak with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
Catherine Helstone's brother, Laon, has disappeared in Arcadia, legendary land of the magical fae. Desperate for news of him, she makes the perilous journey, but once there, she finds herself alone and isolated in the sinister house of Gethsemane. At last there…
I'm a retired diplomat and award-winning novelist with a PhD in history. I was drawn to the German Resistance because, unlike the other resistance movements across Europe, the German Resistance fought not a foreign invader but rather confronted the corruption and hijacking of their own state. Germans opposed to Hitler needed the moral fortitude to commit treason, and ultimately tyrannicide, not for the sake of the nation, but for humanity itself. I devoted ten years of my life to studying the German Resistance, first for my doctoral dissertation and then to write my novel. During that time, I was asked a thousand times why I was so fascinated and committed to the topic. The answer, tragically proven true over the last five years, is that the United States is not immune to fascism. The need to resist a racist and immoral demagogue has never been more relevant.
This is one of the few books available in English that records first-hand the feelings and thoughts of one of those few, courageous Germans who defied Hitler at the risk of their own lives. For that reason alone, it is worth reading. However, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not only an ardent member of the German Resistance, arrested for aiding Jews, he was also an outstanding protestant theologian. His thoughts from a Nazi prison cell are particularly thought-provoking — and poignant. He was executed just before the end of the war. This is a moving yet inspiring read.
One of the great classics of prison literature, Letters and Papers from Prison effectively serves as the last will and testament of the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young German pastor who was executed by the Nazis in 1945 for his part in the “officers’ plot” to assassinate Adolf Hitler. This expanded version of Letters and Papers from Prison shifts the emphasis of earlier editions of Bonhoeffer’s theological reflections to the private sphere of his life. His letters appear in greater detail and show his daily concerns. Letters from Bonhoeffer’s parents, siblings, and other relatives have also…
In my career as a medievalist, I’ve been inspired by L. P. Hartley’s maxim that “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” At the same time, the people who live there are humans like ourselves. So, I’ve always tried to balance the alterity with the universality of the medieval past, asking big questions that bring together a wide range of sources and genres. In my forty years of teaching at Northwestern, I’ve enjoyed watching the impact of medieval texts change with each generation of students as they discover this strange yet immensely generative world.
Charles Williams is one of my guilty pleasures. The most esoteric of the famous Inklings, he wrote supernatural thrillers in which marvels take place in the midst of present-day London. This book, his last and, in my view, his best novel, is set near the end of WW II.
Two young women, killed instantly when a plane crashes onto them, find that they must work out their salvation—or its opposite—in a world where the living and the newly dead can still interact. The gestures of ordinary friendship and everyday cruelty turn out to have eternal stakes in this eerie, unforgettable novel, which I’ve reread more times than I can count.
First published in 1945, "All Hallows' Eve" is a fantasy novel by British writer Charles W. S. Williams. Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886 - 1945) was a British theologian, novelist, poet, playwright, and literary critic. He was also a member of the "The Inklings", a literary discussion group connected to the University of Oxford, England. They were exclusively literary enthusiasts who championed the merit of narrative in fiction and concentrated on writing fantasy. He was given an scholarship to University College London, but was forced to leave in 1904 because he couldn't afford the tuition fees. Other notable works by…
I’ve been reading Tolkien since I was seven years old, mumblety-mumble years in the distant past, but it wasn’t till much later that I got serious about reading critical works on Tolkien, and then turned to writing about him, myself. Twenty years ago, I published my first book on Tolkien. Since then, I’ve edited a number of essay collections, published many papers, consulted on the Hobbit movies, amassed a respectable personal library, and edited Mythlore, one of the major journals in the field of Tolkien studies, since 2006. My love of Tolkien has led me on many adventures and to deep and abiding friendships around the world!
I am fascinated by the contradictions of Tolkien’s women and by the tension between Christian and pagan in his writing.
This book is particularly valuable for its explication of Tolkien’s integration of Marian and Valkyrie imagery, resulting in female characters of transcendental beauty and heroism. And the writing is absorbing and informative.
I discovered labor history during a decade-long hiatus between my first and second years in college. Before that, I had never enjoyed reading about the past, unless it was in a novel. Then I discovered slave narratives and they inspired wider reading about workers’ lives. I loved both the drama of stories about resistance to oppression and the optimism I derived from understanding working people as historical protagonists. Now, as a professional historian, I often approach the past in a more academic way, but dramatic stories continue to attract me and knowledge that working people united have achieved great things in the past still gives me hope for humanity’s future.
Time and again, I’ve given this book to folks in need of inspiration or opened it on a bad day to remind myself of the astonishing inventiveness, generosity, and stamina working people possess.
Recounting the life of a Mexican-American farm worker who became a community activist and union organizer, the book emerged from hundreds of hours of conversation in which Maria Elena Lucas told her story to Fran Leeper Buss and from hundreds of pages of creative writing Lucas had earlier produced. The result is riveting, because of the breadth of Lucas’s experience and the depth of what she shares about her inner life.
Especially stirring to me are the passages that lay out a personal theology that sees the divine in ordinary people and identifies God as a woman of color seeking the best for her children.
I think of Aviya as a book friend. Reading her made me laugh aloud, and I want to meet her over coffee. I could relate to her shock that most families don’t discuss ancient Hebrew grammar at home—I can’t imagine not discussing theology on a daily basis, and my own children had to learn that our home life isn’t common, either.
I appreciated her intellectual honesty and enjoyed seeing the Bible through her eyes and life experience, as a Jew who had only ever read it in Hebrew before starting graduate school. She made me appreciate the Bible in new ways and long to finish mastering ancient Hebrew (if that is possible). At the same time, I gained a more nuanced picture of the God of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures.
Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking family, reading the Bible in the original Hebrew and debating its meaning over the dinner table. She knew much of it by heart - and was therefore surprised when, while getting her MFA at the University of Iowa, she took the novelist Marilynne Robinson's class on the Old Testament and discovered she barely recognized the text she thought she knew so well. Kushner began discussing the experience with Robinson, who became a mentor, and her interest in the differences between the ancient language and the modern one gradually became an obsession. In this…
When I learned in college that the Roman Emperor Constantine was largely responsible for determining the shape of the New Testament, it shook my outlook on religion and how it worked. Since then, I’ve studied the interplay of religion and politics for over 2 decades and taught the subject at universities on both coasts. These books aren’t just ones I find useful in teaching, but each has fanned the flames of my fascination and broadened my awareness and perspective. I hope you enjoy and find yourself thinking differently after reading them!
Rarely has a book blown my mind like this one. Kahn lays bare the foundations of our modern political structures and how we adapt religious conceptions to imbue our states with a sacred aura. I’m fascinated by sacrifice and its place within our civic life, and this book highlights how nearly every aspect of our sovereign international system relies to some extent upon the concept.
It’s like a conceptual history of our modern nation-states that reveals them as ‘religious’ undertakings. While the other books on the list lay out the historical and sociological aspects of religion and politics, this book showed me how religion IS politics—and politics, religion—in unexpected and important ways.
In this strikingly original work, Paul W. Kahn rethinks the meaning of political theology. In a text innovative in both form and substance, he describes an American political theology as a secular inquiry into ultimate meanings sustaining our faith in the popular sovereign. Kahn works out his view through an engagement with Carl Schmitt's 1922 classic, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. He forces an engagement with Schmitt's four chapters, offering a new version of each that is responsive to the American political imaginary. The result is a contemporary political theology. As in Schmitt's work, sovereignty remains…
My first love was architecture. But while I was working as an architectural drafter in my early twenties, I began taking college courses in philosophy and religious studies. During that time, I also acquired a set of the Great Books of the Western World by Encyclopædia Britannica. I was hooked. I quit my job and became a full-time student of philosophy, religion, and history. Since then, I have seen Pascal’s maxim demonstrated in all my research. Namely, that humanity is a living oxymoron: he is like a “reed,” easily blown over. Nevertheless, the human is also a “thinking reed,” concerned with meaning, purpose, and transcendence.
This book offers a vital perspective on the contending theological traditions that underpin the backdrop of the "conflict thesis."
I found Livingston’s insights to be invaluable. By investigating the Enlightenment and the subsequent developments in the 19th century, Livingston provides crucial context for understanding the origins of the perceived conflict between science and religion. His meticulous analysis illuminates the divergent theological currents that shaped intellectual discourse during this period.
For anyone seeking a comprehensive understanding of the complex interplay between faith and reason, this book is essential reading. It not only enriches our understanding of the past but also sheds light on contemporary discussions surrounding science, religion, and society.
This widely acclaimed introduction to modern Christian thought, formerly published by Prentice Hall, provides full, scholarly accounts of the major movements and thinkers, theologians and philosophers in the Christian tradition since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, together with solid historical background and critical assessments.
For most of my 31 years of marriage, my husband and I have walked alongside couples who are preparing for marriage, in the throes of marriage, or trying to salvage their marriage. We get why it’s challenging and absolutely believe that there is hope and healing in the context of marriage for everyone. I’ve written two books on the topic and am passionate about helping couples find the resources they need to grow and strengthen their marriage covenants. Marriage books tend to be a bit shallow and offer quick fixes. We need honest, practical, wise resources if we want to grow.
Faithful: A Theology of Sex is an incredibly important read in a culture that tends to disregard any connection between faith and sexuality. Felker-Jones goes deep and wide. I appreciated her insights on the importance of how we steward our bodies and our sexuality and how this affects both our faith and our marriage covenant. The author makes a compelling case for how “a theology of sexuality demonstrates sex is not about legalistic morals with no basis in reality but rather about the God who is faithful to us.”
Many believers accept traditional Christian sexual morality but have very little idea why it matters for the Christian life. In Faithful, author Beth Felker Jones sketches a theology of sexuality that demonstrates sex is not about legalistic morals with no basis in reality but rather about the God who is faithful to us.
In Hosea 2:19-20 God says to Israel, "I will take you for my wife forever; I will take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will take you for my wife in faithfulness; and you shall know the…
As a young Christian woman passionate about understanding how to serve God and others, I received mixed messages about what I could do in the world because I am female. One of my college professors encouraged me to get my PhD and return as the first female faculty member in their Department of Bible and Theology. Another professor said if I taught theology at the college level, I would be sinning, violating I Timothy 2:12, where the Apostle Paul commands women not to teach men but to learn in silence. Continuing my study in seminary, I was dissatisfied by both liberal and conservative theologians writing on sex and gender differences.
Susannah Cornwall is a leading scholar of intersex and Christian theology. She writes in the Anglican tradition.
This is one of her earlier books, which brings intersex experiences into conversation with the Bible, disability theologies, and LGBTQ theological perspectives. Cornwall's writings are essential for those willing to read beyond conservative Christian authors.
Mainstream Christian theology has valued the integrity of the body and the goodness of God reflected in creation. However, it has also asserted the complementarity of "normal" male and female physiology. Sex and Uncertainty in the Body of Christ offers the first systematic theology of the intersexed body.
The book analyzes the theological implications of physical intersex conditions and their medical treatment. The medical assumption of what constitutes male and female bodies is shown to raise essential questions about the meaning of incarnation and bodiliness. The book argues for a theology that speaks to stigmatized and marginal bodies, examining the…
