.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe Brothers Karamazov<\/i><\/b>, by Fyodor Dostoevsky<\/b><\/p>\n
This was the book that inspired my wife to go on her mission (in particular, Alyosha\u2019s and the monks’ examples of dedicated holiness). It\u2019s quite long (as Russian novels are), but (IMHO) you can get a lot of the spiritual benefit by reading certain sections. \u201cThe Grand Inquisitor\u201d chapter is of course, the classic reading used in introduction to literature classes, but there is profundity and holiness throughout, especially in the sections dealing with Alyosha (I kind of slept-read through the courtroom scenes).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBelieving Christ<\/i><\/b>, by Stephen Robinson<\/b><\/p>\n
I was privileged to take New Testament from Stephen Robinson one of the last years he taught at BYU. He was the epitome of the disciple-scholar, with both impeccable credentials and reasoning as well as impeccable loyalty to the restored gospel. His classic is a very readable and digestible take on atonement theology for Latter-day Saints. Even my elementary school kids read it (to make a point more about the book than about my kids).<\/span><\/p>\nThe Chosen <\/i><\/b>and<\/b> My Name is Asher Lev<\/i><\/b>, by Chaim Potok<\/b><\/p>\n
I get the sense that we Latter-day Saints tend to be philo-semites. Our community has a certain draw to traditional Jewish culture, and there is some sense of holy envy about their synthesis of the intellectual with the religious as well as their rich heritage. This draw of Latter-day Saints towards Judaism is quite old, going back to Joseph Smith using what I imagine were scarce Church funds to hire a Hebrew instructor for the School of the Prophets.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI suspect that is why, again anecdotally, Chaim Potok books have had a certain popularity among members (also evidenced by Potok giving an address at BYU in 1982). His novels about tensions between religious Judaism and modernity strike a certain cord with our (albeit different) own struggles with modernity (the <\/span>Asher Lev<\/span><\/i> scene where he nervously paints the nude woman, for example, is much more relatable for someone from a strongly conservative Latter-day Saint upbringing), and the strong sense of devotion, sacrifice, and loyalty that suffuse his works is inspiring for us religionists.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMan\u2019s Search for Meaning<\/i><\/b>, by Viktor Frankl<\/b><\/p>\n
The psychological classic written by a concentration camp survivor about finding meaning in the worst situations possible. I went deep down the Viktor Frankl rabbit hole during graduate school and read most if not all of his books. He was a founder of a major school of existential psychotherapy that emphasized finding meaning as a solution to mental health issues, so his later works became more technical, but the original is still eminently readable, profound and just plain useful as the ultimate \u201cself-help\u201d book. The book is redolent of spirituality and religion even if he takes pains to communicate that the meaning and higher purpose that it argues is the magic sauce for thriving and survival doesn’t necessarily have to be religious in nature.<\/span><\/p>\nRough Stone Rolling<\/i><\/b>, by Richard Bushman<\/b><\/p>\n
The classic New Mormon History book that needs no introduction, nor much of a defense for why it’s on anybody’s to-read list.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nCry, the Beloved Country<\/i><\/b>, by Alan Paton<\/b><\/p>\n
The story of a pastor\u2019s son in apartheid South Africa (named Absalom, a little on-the-nose) who murdered a white man. A lot of deep feelings in this book. Both the book and movie are required.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe Mystery of the Aleph<\/i><\/b>, by Amir\u00a0Aczel<\/b><\/p>\n
It might seem odd that a math book made it on this list, but religious and spiritual sentiment played a big role in the founding of set theory and transcendent numbers\u2013the kind of mathematics that deals with different levels of infinity. (For example, the mathematical terms involved were given Hebrew names, not the more typical Greek names).<\/span><\/p>\nWit<\/i><\/b>, by Margaret Edson<\/b><\/p>\n
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Also a required movie\/book combo about an English professor\/specialist in the religious sonnets of John Donne who finds her learning to be of little help when faced with her own death from cancer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe Immense Journey<\/i><\/b>, by Loren Eiseley\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
Written by a UPenn scientist\/poet in a golden age when the humanities intermingled effortlessly with the hard sciences, this is the classic book on the beauty of the Creation. Not explicitly religious, but suffused throughout with religious references as a subtle homage to a Creator.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe Secret Language of Sacred Spaces, <\/i>by Jon Canon<\/b><\/p>\n
There are a variety of common themes in sacred spaces across varied religious traditions; this book tied all the threads together and helped me see the architecture and themes in our own sacred spaces such as temples against the background of and in continuity with a larger tradition.<\/span><\/p>\nWrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought, <\/i><\/b>by Terryl Givens<\/b><\/p>\n
Givens has a knack for isolating and distilling the theological things that make us uniquely us; this works as a sort of highbrow primer in Latter-day Saint theology<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Depiction of an LDS temple\/library combination. One of the advantages of homeschooling is that you have the bandwidth to fine-tune your children\u2019s reading and media diet on a level that would be very difficult to pull off if they were gone for half the day.\u00a0 I\u2019ve read quite a bit in my day (although I\u2019m not currently reading as much as I used to), and whenever I come across a book that I want to make sure my children read I put it on a particular \u201cshelf\u201d in my Goodreads account. Below is my list of \u201crequired reading\u201d books that are religious themed or at least have a strong spiritual\/existential message.\u00a0 The Plague, by Albert Camus\u00a0 The famous French absurdist\u2019s landmark work is interlaced with religious and existential themes as a town struggles against a deadly plague. Unlike many secular or secular-adjacent authors, Camus is rather bold in confronting the implications of naturalistic, non-religious worldview, and my personal experience with this book was powerful enough that I actually published an article in the Journal of Camus Studies on religious symbolism in The Plague.\u00a0 The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky This was the book that inspired my wife to go on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":46449,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2885],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-language-and-literature"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/DALL\u00b7E-2024-02-08-22.15.35-A-photorealistic-interior-view-of-a-combined-LDS-temple-and-library.-The-space-blends-two-distinct-areas_-a-serene-spiritual-temple-area-with-elegant.webp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46447"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50228,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46447\/revisions\/50228"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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