CS Lewis? I have read some Lewis every year of my life since I was in single digits. Tolkien? When I found him in seventh grade, I lost a weekend on Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Since that year, Tolkien has been a constant source of joy. John Chrysostom, Augustine, and John Bunyan keep teaching me.
I like to read and great books matter.
You don’t need me, a non-expert, to tell you John Chrysostom is worth hearing . . . he was nicknamed “golden mouthed.” Every year I teach other great thinkers, philosophers, and novelists that are Christian and mentioning them can end up just being name dropping.
GK Chesterton: if you are not reading him now, where have you been? William Shakespeare, Christian dramatist and one of the creators of the English language, needs no ballyhoo. We could read the famous people for the rest of our lives and that would be good enough.
However, if you love to read like I do, then finding somebody less famous (at least to this American of a certain age) who is marvelous is wonderful news. For the sheer joy of it, here are five Christian authors most people I meet* have not read, but that have had some value in my life.
Nobody is Augustine or Chrysostom and Tolkien invented modern fantasy if anybody did, but these are writers I have loved (and most are great authors).
Justin Martyr
If you grew up on Disney like I did, your first thought on hearing this was to ask if Justin Martyr had a horse. That’s a totally different kind of literature, a different Justin, and Morgan not Martyr, but worth reading as well.
Justin was a philosopher, early apologist, a daring thinker, and martyr. If you swallow the lie that Christians got all their Greek ideas from Constantine, read Justin. He is well versed in Greek and Roman rhetorical style, some of his “arguments” are merely counter-jabs at the persecuting pagans. Justin would have loved Twitter. However, Justin can also make a tight neo-Platonic argument as well. His Apology is a peek into a different academic world and at how quickly the early church could match the sophistication of the pagans.
Christina Rossetti
Most people only know her because she wrote a Christmas carol (In the Bleak Midwinter). That’s too bad, because she is a romantic and a Christian who produced poetry that combines both with (almost) no flaws. Good Friday is honest and worth an hour’s thought even if it is just a few lines long. Rossetti had a powerful imagination and her Goblin Mart shows that the ancient story poems could still be written.
Alexander Schmemann
Read For the Life of the World which cannot be summarized. Schmemann takes a world stripped of meaning and grants meaning to everything. The Incredibles were not quite right: if God makes everything divine, then everything can be special.
Sheldon Vanauken
If the word “lilac” makes you wish to read a book, then this is the book for you. This book is the story of a great, if flawed romance, between a decent man and a woman who was his better and Jesus who tried to make the romance deeper. Like Wuthering Heights, the first part can overwhelm the second, but the second contains the lesson that is needed for romantics. As he grew older, Van grew better and his essays watch history and ask for a replay.
Old Elizabeth
If you have not read her memoir, you are missing a most powerful story of faith, courage, and a prophetic call to justice. She lived the truth that for the slave there was: “nobody in the wide world to look to but God.”**
Anthony Trollope
He is less well known than Dickens, but better. Read The Warden or The Way We Live Now and you will find someone who loves traditional England so much that he knows he must kill some of it. This is a man who is a progressive conservative: destroy what cannot be saved so that which remains will be nourished by those who loved the whole.
Over his lifetime, Trollope seems to have evolved from a High Church traditionalist to the Broad Church, though mostly out of a commendable dislike of dogmatism and an enjoyment of a great many friends with a diversity of views. He seems to have practiced a fairly traditional Anglican faith, but disliked kicking anyone out of that Church. He feared narrowness would cause numerical decline, a mistake still made by much inferior thinkers and writers.
Trollope, especially the Trollope of Barchester and Palliser is a treat not to be missed.
Catherine Marshall
Just like Vanauken, Marshall is not a great or globally significant writer, but I enjoy her books and think a few other people might as well! The two books you should read are A Man Called Peter and Christy. Before there was a Christian book ghetto, Catherine Marshall was read by everyone. A Man Called Peter is about a marriage and a time when mainline Christianity was Christian. Christy tells the story of mountain people (my people!) in a sympathetic manner. Before we were “deplorables,” there was Christy.
There are so many good books, decent writers, and so little time. The Church Fathers are hundreds of pages of wisdom, the Victorians write hundreds of pages to start a book, and the entire world has produced books that are only now available in translation.
The library displays the Glory of the image of God in humankind.
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*I exclude here my great books college friends in Torrey Honors, King’s College, or The Saint Constantine School. They will know them all well.
**N/A (2012-05-16). Memoir of Old Elizabeth, A Coloured Woman (Kindle Location 16). . Kindle Edition.