Confessing Evangelical

I'm starting to develop a persecution complex. First Thomas tags me with one book list meme, now Bunnie traps me in a pincer movement with this hospital pass:

Imagine that a local philanthropist is hosting an event for local high school students and has asked you to pick out five to ten books to hand out as door prizes. At least one book should be funny and at least one book should provide some history of Western Civilization and at least one book should have some regional connection. The philanthropist doesn’t like foul language (but will allow some four-letter words in context, such as expressed during battle by soldiers). Otherwise things are pretty wide open. What do you pick?

Hah! Like banning foul language will keep me from my stated aim of corrupting these impressionable high-school students! Bwa-ha-haaa!

The other conditions (I'm not sure whether these are original, or added by Bunnie): (1) one book must be something you're a bit embarrassed to admit is on your favorites list, (2) all books would be suitable for adults and (3) one book changed the way you look at the world.

Western Civilization

1. The Communist Manifesto (online text here), by Karl Marx: Here's a book that changed my view of the world. I subsequently changed it back (like the Bob Roberts song, "Times are Changin' Back"), but let's not split hairs here. And there are some great lines in it: "Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat."
   
   And (in the spirit of Rick Ritchie's question 4 1/2) I'd make sure the copies handed out were the Penguin edition, including AJP Taylor's waspish and debunking introduction: "Marx seemed to his contemporaries a subversive writer, challenging accepted habits of thought. In retrospect he appears as a respectable Victorian gentleman of scholarly disposition, much given, as many Victorians were, to knowing what was good for his intellectual inferiors."
   


2. How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions, by Francis Wheen: Wheen shows Michael Moore how polemic should be done. He provides a brief history of the growth of irrationality both in the west and elsewhere, in particular since 1979. Much of the book consists of an amusing, if slightly autopilot, canter through Thatcherism, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the New Age movement, televangelism, the death of Princess Diana and so on.
   
   The last couple of chapters are something else, and are clearly what Wheen really wanted to say, his excuse for writing the rest of the book, as he lays into global capitalism on the one (right) hand, and on the other (left) hand, the irrational response to 9/11 which has seen the western Left being driven to side with Islamists out of their knee-jerk opposition to the USA.
   
   Wheen fails to realise that his preferred option of Enlightenment rationalism is a busted flush, and just as you find yourself cheering him on he comes out with something absolutely enraging, but that's what he's set out to achieve, and it is certainly a fun and thought-provoking read.
   


3. An Equal Music, by Vikram Seth: like all Seth's books (such as A Suitable Boy and The Golden Gate), this is beautifully written. It gets in here because of the insight it provides into western classical music, particularly the experience of being a member of a string quartet, and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose Art of Fugue is central to the plot. (As it happens, I have no idea what it's like to be in a string quartet, but Seth makes you feel like you do, which is precisely my point.)
   


4. Scanning the Century, edited by Peter Forbes: This anthology, subtitled "The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry", aims to tell the story of the twentieth century through the eyes of its poets: including topics such as the Great War, Communism, Jazz, Fascism & Nazism, the Cold War, pop music and the media. Beautiful book, great idea and some top poetry.
   


5. Pure Sex, by Sydney Anglican stalwarts Tony Payne & Phillip Jensen: one thing our high school students will be treated to over the years is what CS Lewis described as a diet of "good solid lies about sex". This book aims to counteract this, by looking at the personal agendas, dubious science and bogus statistics of those who helped engineer the sexual revolution in the west. Phillip Jensen admits that one of the aims of the book was to "play the man, not the ball", and in particular the Bloomsbury Set and Alfred Kinsey do not come out of this book well.
   
   But it also shows a better way, by defending the Christian way to enjoy truly "pure sex", and also including a brief summary of the gospel to balance what could otherwise by a good solid diet of law about sex. And with a title like that, there's a fighting chance that at least some of our high school students might even read it, which is more than can be said for many of the books we're all suggesting in this exercise...

Funny

1. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson: apart from being very funny, and featuring great artwork, reading Calvin & Hobbes is also great training for parenthood. Long before we started a family, reading Calvin cartoons did wonders for reconciling my wife to the idea of having boys (which is just as well).

Regional

My excuse for including four books relating to human origins and Darwinism under "Regional" is that I live about ten minutes' drive from Down House, Charles Darwin's home in north-west Kent.

One of the aims of my list is to select books that will encourage our recipients to think, and so I thought it worth having several books looking at one area from various perspectives. Plus this is an area on which my own thinking is far from 100% resolved, so hopefully this will make it less of a descending-from-Mt-Sinai affair than it might have been if I'd selected another topic:

1. Climbing Mount Improbable, by Richard Dawkins: Let's be honest. Darwinian evolution is widely accepted both inside and outside the church. It tells a story that people find compelling, and has some highly articulate and convincing advocates, not least the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.
   
   This is one of Prof Dawkins' most compelling, not to mention exhilirating, books. He is an excellent writer, and this book includes some of his most illuminating metaphors (such as the "Mount Improbable" of the title), as well as such tours de force as his demonstration of how even the human eye could have developed through natural selection and a long, slow climb up Mount Improbable.
   


2. Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, by Phillip E. Johnson: A great little introduction to the shocking idea that (however persuasive Prof Dawkins & co may be) evolutionary thinking may not actually have tied up every loose end. Encourages you to question some of the underlying assumptions behind the evolutionary consensus, introduces the idea of intelligent design, and provides some useful mental and logical tools for examining not only evolutionism, but any other "metanarrative" that might otherwise be accepted unquestioningly (hey! watch where you're pointing that thing!).
   
   This book played a key role in shifting my own views on human origins from "theistic evolution" to, um, whatever they are now, um, seven days, framework, 24 hours, um, can I get back to you on that one? Compiling this list also reminds me that I must get round to reading this some time.
   


3. Darwin's Black Box, by Michael Behe: Having finished Prof Dawkins' book, and sat back amazed at the convincing account of how evolution can explain everything from the symbiotic relationship between fruit wasps and fig trees, to that creationist shibboleth the human eye, you can then turn to Michael Behe's book, where he proceeds to provide an equally compelling counterargument based on the concept of "irreducible complexity".
   
   Behe argues that, like a mousetrap, whose operation requires several interdependent components to be present and configured correctly, various biological systems (such as eyes, or the blood-clotting cascade) are "irreducibly complex": take away one aspect and they do not merely function "less well", but they fail to function at all. Thus they could not have developed by gradual evolutionary development, but required an "intelligent designer" to put the various pieces together.
   
   As with Dawkins, even if you are not convinced by his conclusions, the description of the science itself - the biochemical mechanisms at work within cells and organisms - is fascinating.
   


4. In the Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis, by Henri Blocher: the first book I ever bought on Amazon, this is one of the classic expositions of the so-called "literary-framework interpretation" of Genesis 1 to 3. Some of its particular strengths include Blocher's arguments for the unity of Genesis 1 & 2, based on numerological considerations (the number of occurrences in those chapters of "the LORD", "God", "the LORD God", and so on) and of the different literary structures of those two chapters (the two "tablets", as Blocher describes them).
   
   Then there is his demolition of the idea that taking Genesis 3 as a myth means we can get away from the idea of descent from Adam, original sin and so on, and read it as being about a fall from innocence in each human life (the "Adam as Everyman" approach). On the contrary, argues Blocher, if Genesis 3 is a myth, then it is a myth whose message is precisely that the entire human race descended from a single couple who rebelled against God.
   
   Again - and you'll see there's a pattern emerging here - even if you end up disagreeing with Blocher's conclusions, this is a stimulating book that will make you think. It is also very French, and I mean that in a good way.

Right then, I tag DS Ketelby (who can choose between today's and yesterday's tagging depending on which tickles his fancy; or both, if he's a total obsessive like me), Chris Atwood, and - just to send this meme (word coined by Richard Dawkins, of course) spiralling into the southern hemisphere - Greg and Craig.

[Note: I now realise I misinterpreted the rules (great lawyer, eh? sheesh). Turns out you don't have to fit all the books into the above categories. Doing so made it a more interesting exercise, for me if for no-one else, but my taggees need not feel constrained in the same way.]