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Reading List on Faith, Vocation, and Culture
“Seamlessness” is a word that is central to our work. We believe that because Jesus is Lord of all of life, that “every square inch” should be seen in its relation to his life-giving authority. The universe coheres around that truth. Everything for everyone—whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we believe it or not.
The reading list for The Washington Institute reflects that conviction. We see faith, vocation, and culture with that same kind of seamlessness. They are different words with different meanings, and yet they form a vision of a coherent life, a life where faith forms vocation in the context of culture.
These books represent the centuries of the Church, but also the 21 st-century, the pre-modern world and the post-modern world. We live our lives stretched taut “between two worlds,” as John Stott has taught us, viz. the world of the ancient text of Scripture and the world of the most contemporary ideas and issues. We hope that you will find your way into a deeper understanding of God, of human nature, of history, and that in doing so you will be someone whose vocation is formed by that of Jesus and the gospel of the kingdom—learning to see and hear and feel the world as he does.
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*These books with an asterisk represent our “life on a desert island" choices, but that is hard because it is too much like choosing which fingers you want to keep.
Hannah Arendt
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Augustine
*Confessions
The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love
Robert Bellah et. al,
Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life
Wendell Berry
Sex, Economy, Freedom, Community
A Timbered Choir
That Distant Land
Harry Blamires
The Christian Mind
Bono
Bono in Conversation with Michka Assayas
John Bunyan
Pilgrim’s Progress
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
Brian Godawa
Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment
Os Guinness
The Call
Colin Gunton
The One, the Three and the Many
Victor Hugo
*Les Miserables
David Lyle Jeffrey, ed.
English Spirituality in the Time of Wesley
Abraham Kuyper
Lectures on Calvinism
*To Be Near Unto God
Garth Lean
God’s Politician: William Wilberforce’s Struggle
C. S. Lewis
Mere Christianity
The Abolition of Man
That Hideous Strength
Richard Lovelace
The Dynamics of Spiritual Life
Lesslie Newbigin
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
Signs Amid the Rubble
Henri Nouwen
Life of the Beloved
John Owen
Sin and Temptation
J. I. Packer
*Knowing God
J. I. Packer and Loren Wilkinson, ed.
Alive to God: Studies in Spirituality
Cornelius Plantinga
Engaging God’s World
Charlie Peacock
A New Way to Be Human
Walker Percy
*Signposts in a Strange Land
Love in the Ruins
The Thanatos Syndrome
John Pollock
Wilberforce
The Quest of the Holy Grail
Dorothy Sayers
Creed or Chaos
Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian
Doctrine
Francis Schaeffer
The God Who is There
He is There and He is Not Silent
True Spirituality
Edith Schaeffer
Hidden Art
James Sire
Habits of the Mind
John Stott
Christian Mission in the Modern World
New Issues Facing Christians Today
Steve Turner
King of Twist
Up to Date
Thomas Watson
The Beatitudes
Simone Weil
Waiting for God
William Wilberforce
Real Christianity
Lauren Winner
Real Sex
Tom Wolfe
Hooking Up
I Am Charlotte Simmons
N.T. Wright
For All God’s Worth: True Worship and the Calling of the Church
The Lord and His Prayer
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by Steve Garber
A few years ago a pastor in the city asked if I would meet someone in his congregation whose work was in the world of national security. A senior official with complex responsibilities, he knew that his deepening faith required him to “think Christianly” about his life and labour, but he did not know where to begin.
by Kate Harris
In Washington DC, it is only a matter of time before the kind woman standing next to me at a cocktail party will turn from talking with my husband and ask the inevitable, identity-testing, status-gauging question I have come to dread as a new and mostly stay-at-home mother…“And what do you do?”
by Ray Blunt
Martin Luther doesn’t make many appearances in the pages of the numerous leadership tomes that reach bookstore shelves each year...but what not many may know is that those in public service owe him a large debt of gratitude because he introduced the idea that a calling (i.e. a vocation) is of critical importance in secular life. More »
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More Resources > |
Why is it that when we pray together as the people of God gathered for worship on Sunday, we regularly pray for our missionaries in Kenya and Kazakhstan, but not for our attorneys on K Street? |
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With a vision that is at the same time very local and embodied, and very national and international, The Washington Institute is a network of men and women who are learning about the meaning of vocation, of what it means to hear God as he calls people to care for the world in his name. |
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Quotables > |
"...The homeliest service that we doe in an honest calling, though it be but to plow, or digge, if done in obedience, and conscience of God’s Commandment, is crowned with an ample reward; whereas the best workes for their kinde (preaching, praying, offering Evangelicall sacrifices) if without respect of God’s injunction and glory, are loaded with curses. God loveth adverbs; and cares not how good, but how well..."
Joseph Hall
Bishop of Norwich and Puritan Divine
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