{"id":46594,"date":"2024-02-29T14:53:31","date_gmt":"2024-02-29T21:53:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=46594"},"modified":"2025-05-28T20:09:33","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T02:09:33","slug":"my-religious-themed-required-reading-list-part-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2024\/02\/my-religious-themed-required-reading-list-part-iii\/","title":{"rendered":"My Religious-Themed Required Reading List, Part III"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Price We Paid<\/em>, by Andrew Olsen<\/b><\/p>\n

For how legendary (in both a good and bad sense) the Willy and Martin handcart companies are in our collective consciousness, it was good to read a scholarly work on the subject.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Oxford Translation of the Bible<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

Everybody should read a solid non-KJV translation (and one that doesn’t lean towards word-for-word literalism like the KJV).<\/span><\/p>\n

Passage by Faith. Exploring the Inspirational Art of James Christensen<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

Maybe my tastes are kitschy and lowbrow, but I find James Christensen\u2019s art to be some of the most straightforwardly inspiring out there.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gospel Principles<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

I know we don’t have a gospel principles class anymore, but when you’re raising your own kids it’s easy to just think that gospel basics will just be absorbed via osmosis. Embarrassing but fun personal anecdote, despite having been born of goodly parents and having a solid religious upbringing I somehow got to junior high without knowing that Jesus was the literal biological son of God and not just the spiritual son from Joseph and Mary; I wasn’t informed about this fact until my brother started talking about how schmaltzy the conceived-by-the-power-of-the-force Christian reference was in Star Wars, Episode I.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It’s surprising what random holes some people have in their religious education. It’s useful to literally have a list of the basics published by the Church to teach your kids to make sure nothing gets missed. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Life After Death: The Evidence,<\/em> by Dinesh D’Souza<\/b><\/p>\n

Dinesh D\u2019Souza has gone completely nuts politically, but this book is a very readable introduction to religious arguments about the afterlife.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Five Books of Jesus,<\/em> by James Goldberg<\/b><\/p>\n

A moving take on the Savior\u2019s life story by our own James Goldberg.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

40 Years Among the Indians,<\/em> by Daniel Webster Jones<\/b><\/p>\n

I’m a little partial because this is my wife\/children’s ancestor, but also a very readable primary source of early Utah from the perspective of somebody who lived quite the swashbuckling\/adventurer life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary,<\/em> by Robert Alter<\/b><\/p>\n

In some sense this book is a placeholder for any book by Robert Alter. I don’t get the sense that he\u2019s a believer, but he is the go-to writer if you want to learn how to appreciate the prose and poetry of the Bible.<\/span><\/p>\n

Saints Series<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

The Church Office Building folks really hit this one out of the park. A highly readable history of the Church digestible by almost all ages.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe,<\/em> by Brian Greene<\/b><\/p>\n

Physicist Brian Greene is, IMHO, one of the greatest popular writers of physics today, but this book takes a step back and looks at the broader picture. Unlike some materialists that wax poetic about beauty and meaning seemingly oblivious to the implications of the reductionism and inevitable oblivion logically baked into their worldview, Green is willing, if hesitant, to bite the materialist bullet and ask serious, brave questions about meaning in the face of absolute, eternal, blackness at the end of the universe. While a secular book, I\u2019m mentioning it in the same breath as spiritual\/religious books because he takes seriously the limitations of the finite, materialist worldview in creating meaning.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe,<\/em> by Michael Denton<\/b><\/p>\n

While whispers of design and fine tuning are more acceptable in the physics community, the New Atheist types have executed a rather effective smear campaign against any whispers of design in biology to the point where \u201cintelligent design\u201d is a hiss and a byword in biology in ways that \u201cfine tuning\u201d is not for physicists. Of course, it doesn\u2019t help the ID folks when many of them make common political cause with the anti-evolutionists. Wrongheaded political strategy notwithstanding, the fact is there are still some pretty big gaps that aren\u2019t all resolved by a simple appeals to evolutionary mechanisms (for example, the first reproducing cell), and this book is as good as any about laying out all these gaps.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Children of Men,<\/em> by P.D. James<\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve already written at great length<\/span><\/a> about how intrinsically pronatalist our theology is. This fictional work about a world where people can\u2019t have children and are slowly moving to extinction raises a lot of uncomfortable, queasy questions about how much of our meaning is tied to somebody generating the next generation, even if it isn\u2019t us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Jesus the Christ: A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy Scriptures, Both Ancient and Modern,<\/em> by James Talmage<\/b><\/p>\n

I wrote a whole post on this one.\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

The Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries Revealing the Mind Behind the Universe,<\/em> by Stephen Mayer<\/b><\/p>\n

Everything written about <\/span>Nature\u2019s Destiny<\/span><\/i> above applies to this book, which is another readable synopsis of all the little coincidences in both the physical and biological world that add up (and no they aren\u2019t all easily answerable by just saying \u201cDarwin\u201d).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Giant Joshua, <\/i>by Maurine Whipple<\/b><\/p>\n

There are some eyeroll parts (as I duck to avoid the darts from the Mormon-Lit Danites), but it’s not hard to see why this has become the undisputed canonical great work in Mormon literature.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Great Divorce; Mere Christianity; Screwtape Letters; Yours, Jack;<\/em> by C.S. Lewis<\/b><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have anything particularly unique to say about CS Lewis and why he is wonderful. In this sense I\u2019m a pretty typical Latter-day Saint. The Great Divorce gets it so right. \u00a0The cosmology matches up quite well with Latter-day Saint perspective, and I sort of suspect that he received personal revelation on a number of issues, his take on theosis in particular.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Price We Paid, by Andrew Olsen For how legendary (in both a good and bad sense) the Willy and Martin handcart companies are in our collective consciousness, it was good to read a scholarly work on the subject.\u00a0 Oxford Translation of the Bible Everybody should read a solid non-KJV translation (and one that doesn’t lean towards word-for-word literalism like the KJV). Passage by Faith. Exploring the Inspirational Art of James Christensen Maybe my tastes are kitschy and lowbrow, but I find James Christensen\u2019s art to be some of the most straightforwardly inspiring out there.\u00a0 Gospel Principles I know we don’t have a gospel principles class anymore, but when you’re raising your own kids it’s easy to just think that gospel basics will just be absorbed via osmosis. Embarrassing but fun personal anecdote, despite having been born of goodly parents and having a solid religious upbringing I somehow got to junior high without knowing that Jesus was the literal biological son of God and not just the spiritual son from Joseph and Mary; I wasn’t informed about this fact until my brother started talking about how schmaltzy the conceived-by-the-power-of-the-force Christian reference was in Star Wars, Episode I.\u00a0 It’s surprising what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":46601,"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-46594","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-2024-02-29-16.51.01-Imagine-a-tremendously-large-complex-and-extravagant-library-designed-as-the-Library-of-God.-The-architecture-is-grand-and-awe-inspiring-with-high.webp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46594","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=46594"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50230,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46594\/revisions\/50230"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}