Dr. Peter Kreeft | The 10 Books Nobody Should Be Allowed to Die Without Reading

I thought I would give you something practical rather than theoretical today since philosophers are usually very good at theory and very bad at practice which is why every philosopher needs a wife books the number one piece of educational technology that has ever been invented the only thing that might rival books as a means to the end of education would be asking honest but dumb questions many of the greatest discoveries in history were made by asking really stupid questions well what is a book a book is a way of connecting with another person's mind we have two ways of sharing our mind with other people speaking and ringing and speaking transcends space what I'm doing now is communicating something of my mind to you through my mouth and your ears which are separated by a considerable space writing does more than that writing also transcends time you write something down and then you send it through the mail or you print it and have people read it years later or sometimes centuries later and it's almost as if you're still alive when you're reading a book written by a dead person you're in contact with this ghost that is with his spirit with his mind it's a marvelous invention well there are two kinds of books there are ordinary books which are usually kind of small and kind of stupid and then there are great books and I just don't know why the term great books is so controversial and why great books education is so rare and why at many education conferences when you say you teach great books they look at you as if you had two heads and say oh you're one of those have no idea my response is oh you prefer stupid crummy little books the great book I think the main reason great books are so rare is that our society is increasingly believing in a kind of relativism not only is beauty in the eye of the older but so is truth and so it's goodness the one thing that our society is judgemental about is judgmentalism you may not make value judgments well in that case you have the end of all ethics the end of all virtue in the end of all education because in order to educate you have to make a judgment about what is worth educating someone about I think this is the main reason why all the sciences are radically improving and all the humanities are radically decaying because you can't be a successful scientist without believing in objective truth science is about the real world but increasingly in the humanities especially in literature and philosophy the fashionable view now in order not to be judgmental is that truth is our own creation our own invention that you create your own reality that nothing is a mirror and everything is a window so you only see your own mind reflected in what you say well ultimately I believe that's the philosophy of hell my notion of Hell is that it's more scary than the usual the usual one is that it's a terrifying fire pit where demons insert hot pitchforks into unrepentant posteriors that's not so terrifying because the demons are outside of you and so is the pitchfork and so is the fire but supposed to inside you suppose there's nothing outside at all Bossier totally lonely suppose the only person there is yourself you've rejected God therefore you've rejected all these creatures and you're all alone forever with no hope I think that's the most horrible scenario I can imagine well if you believe that truth is subjective that's one step towards that what's out there is just you know what I hear you saying whenever anybody says what I hear you saying is I get very suspicious in other words if you were in my position this is what you would mean by these words but you're not in my position you're not you the basic principle of reading any book is listen don't please ever interpret a book by your own personal sincerely held beliefs that's the mistake whether you're reading the Bible or the Communist Manifesto interpret the book by the author's beliefs get outside of your mind into his mind and then respond a book is almost like a person it's somebody else all right who do you want to listen to who is worth learning stuff from well big people spiritually big people who write spiritually big books what books when I asked the people who invited me here what they wanted me to speak about they said well choose your own topic and I said no give me a topic and we dickered for a little while and I don't know whether it was me or them that came up with the idea the ten books I would want you not to die without having read ten great books that you may be a little surprised about and we agree that that's a good topic because that gives you something you don't already know for me to simply tell you what you already know for me to simply pat you on the head and say look how wise you are you agree with me that makes you go home with a smile but it doesn't put anything new in your mind I guarantee that all the books that I'm going to talk about today will put something new in your mind and in your heart because the heart and the mind are always connected but I cheated I first made a list of ten and then I said I've got to expand it a little bit so I expanded it to 13 and then I noticed that they could be divided into categories the categories are auto autobiographies novels plays epics fantasy science fiction spirituality apologetics classic philosophy popular philosophy history theology and poetry that's thirteen important divisions and then I discovered that I had a difficult time picking between two great books in each area so I said what the heck I'll make it twice each category so 2 times 13 is 26 so instead of the ten books that I'm recommending it's 26 and the standard that I used was not simply which books are classics which books have rightly guided Western civilization the most you probably already know that but books you maybe haven't read before and you absolutely must read because I know they are going to stretch your heart and your mind and your spirit and I know they are food that you want to to chew on so here they are even if I say nothing that's worth remembering you've got a piece of paper that's a reading list for you and you've got 26 great educational experiences in front of you the last standard is I didn't want to make these books too difficult I didn't want to recommend books that could be read only by college professors or even only by people who have a college degree on the other hand I wanted to make them challenging books that if you were a fairly intelligent and thoughtful person and have a good high school education you could understand so they're in the middle I start with Augustine's Confessions which i think is the greatest book ever written outside the Bible if I had to go to a desert island and take only three books with me I think the first one would be how to build a boat second one would be the Bible and the third will probably be the confessions but be careful to get the sheet translation because a Gustin is a poet Agustin's latin sings and most of you don't know Latin and it's very difficult to translate poetry from one language into another and get the sound right you can get the concepts right but one language sounds very different than another well she gets the sound right he translates the fact that Agustin sings rather than just speaks prose it's a very beautiful translation of a passionate and thoroughly human being who has committed every sin in the book and becomes a great saint great Saints are usually made out of great sinners you need passion to be redirected to God in order to start up a stuck car you need much more force than to turn a speeding car around underneath a agrees well somebody who is running away from God is at least running and God can more easily make a saint out of a passionate sinner than out of a limp spaghetti noodle Agustin has what so few people in our society have anymore namely passion and once his passion is directed to truth and goodness he becomes one of the greatest Saints of all time in fact medieval Europe is made I think more by agustin than by any other single human being with the possible exception of Socrates everybody in this room either would not exist or would be a very very different person if a ghost did it existed so read the confessions I guarantee it'll it'll ring what other autobiography well there's a book that's not nearly as famous and it's not as great and it's not written by a canonized saint but it's written by a man of passion and a man of poetry and a very good man Sheldon talkin whom I knew personally a severe mercy is an autobiography that begins with a beautiful pre-christian pagan love story proceeds to a conversion story CS Lewis was the main agent there and then concludes with the story about death love faith and death are three of the most important things in life and this is a beautiful story I just a few minutes ago as to other people whether they read the book they both said yes and my first question was what did you weep and they both said yes I have asked 43 people now have you read the book 42 of them have wept so if you read that book bring a couple handkerchiefs especially for the death scene novels second category notice that I didn't include sociology or psychology I think the best way to understand human feelings and behavior what they're individual or social is by reading novels they're concrete rather than abstract they're practical rather than theoretical to read a novelist to make a lot of friends because a good novelist has to identify with all those characters and to do that they have to be real and the characters drive a novel you meet them you understand them you live inside their flesh for a little while that's especially true of great novelists and probably the greatest one is dusty etske and my candidate for the greatest novel ever written is the Karamazov there's everything in there he stretches you if you don't want to be stretched if you want to be patted on the head and feel comfortable don't read us tsk he's a volcano Hales he'll he'll and he'll put you in touch with two people that you didn't dream existed one of them is the Satan in you and the other is the Christ in you and his characters sometimes a single character are living sometimes in heaven sometimes in Hell there they're all weird but that doesn't mean we can't identify them with them because we're weird you just suppress it so that's all I have to say about the book it's about just everything it's of course a novel and therefore it's about human interaction and it's about love and hate and death and life and faith and doubt and despair and hope and it's also a great detective story a second choice I'm not saying that these are the two greatest novels ever written but my second choice less universally known is the book that CS Lewis thought was the best one he ever wrote and I totally agree with him till we have faces is a book that's laid in pagan pre-christian Greece and it's about the problem of evil and it's about sin and what to do about it and what God does about it in other words it's about the same thing as Agustin's confessions in the Brothers Karamazov but it's beautifully written and everyone I have ever talked to who has read that book has read it a second time and 100% of the people who read it a second time said the first time was good the second time was twice as good it's one of these books that has layers in it each layer makes sense you don't even plow through a bad layer the first time just as a story it makes sense but then when you reread it you see like an onion all sorts of layers I've read at least 12 times I get something out of it that's new each time I'm gonna put a lot of CS Lewis in here he's my favorite modern author in fact six of these 26 books are from CS Lewis 4 by GK Chesterton third category plays my favorite movie of all time is a man for all seasons Robert bolt was the playwright who wrote the play in the movie is based on and faithful to the play and usually when you make a movie out of a play or a novel the movie messes it up because movie makers are very arrogant and they want to add and change the author but both who was supervising the movie didn't do that this is totally faithful to to the play and everything from the music to the sets to the characters fits the play so yeah read the play but definitely see the movie by the way I don't classify The Passion of the Christ as a movie i classify it as a liturgy it it's a time machine it takes you back 2,000 years to miracle I assume you've all seen it so that's a category of its own but next to that I think a man for all seasons is the greatest movie of all time and the play is one of the best of all time my other play Thornton Wilder's our town unfortunately is taught to the only people in America who shouldn't read the play high school students adolescence because an adolescent quite rightly is a rebel and read they they rebel against the establishment and ordinary people and there parents and their family and this is about parenting and about families and about ordinary people so it seems to most high school students very familiar and quite kind of hokey and back woodsy and ordinary and not spectacular and comforting it's exactly the opposite it's terrifying when hard-nosed Hollywood elites first saw the play they broke down and wept perhaps for the only time in their lives it's a play that is so popular that tonight somewhere in the world it is being put on on some stage there's no other play it's that popular it's popular in in hundreds of translations in hundreds of languages as well as in America the key to its success I think is that this ordinary life is looked at from the viewpoint of the dead the main characters die but instead of looking at death from the viewpoint of life which we usually do you also get to look at life from the viewpoint of death and that's jolting is beautiful it's another tearjerker by the way I think that's a pretty good indication that the writer gets an A tears that's an impossible thing to force I command you to quark to cry to weep that's ridiculous can't be done how can i e licit tears following to waste by doing something very bad like giving you a good kick or by doing something very good by presenting something so good or so beautiful that you weep I think that the greatest coal of fir an artist the greatest job description for any artists especially artists in words is to break the human heart because no heart can possibly be a whole heart unless it's first been broken just as nothing can rise from the dead unless the first ice so our ordinary heart has to be broken before it can be complete and great works of art do that every one of the six books that I've mentioned before does that and so does the Lord of the Rings which for different polls of readers ordinary readers picked as the greatest book of the 20th century the only class of people that does not believe that the Lord of the Rings is the greatest book of the 20th century our literary critics which doesn't say anything about the Lord of the Rings but it says a lot about the critics that they are a bunch of overstuffed proud and arrogant out-of-touch elitists but it is certainly the greatest book of the century there's no question about it this is another book that I've read at least a dozen times I have to I have to read it every couple of years every couple years I get a little antsy and things missing what's missing oh I haven't read the Lord of the Rings for a couple of years the movies good if you if you've not read the book but I've seen the movie I'm sorry you should have read the book first and the movie might spoil you're reading the book because instead of your own imagination you might use Peter Jackson's imagination which is very good I mean the acting is good and the costumes are perfect and the special effects are wonderful idol scenes are great the settings are terrific but he doesn't understand talking he doesn't understand heroism every one of the basic characters in his movie is cut down to ordinary size but in talking they're not so the book is far better than the movie it's a long book but Tolkien himself said that he wept and keeps weeping when he reads his manuscript at two points I was very pleased to read that after I had finished the Lord of the Rings a couple of times and read Tolkien's letters which are very good by the way and I was pleased to read that those are the same two passages that I wept at but there was a third weeping when you come to the end the end oh my goodness how can I possibly come to the end of visits tokine said I don't usually read my own critics because we have different standards but I do accept one criticism of the Lord of the Rings which is about 1,500 pages long namely it's much too short when you close this epic fantasy and turn your head from the book to your refrigerator or your garbage cans you don't get the impression that you're moving from a less real world to a more real world just the opposite somehow it's much more difficult to believe in your garbage can than to believe in Frodo and Bilbo and the other characters in Lord of the Rings and that's sort of true also with CS Lewis's great achievement in The Chronicles of Narnia I'm not sure whether Lois will be known and recognized as great five hundred years from now I think he will but I'm almost certain that The Chronicles of Narnia will because they are not only the best children's books ever written their children's books which can be enjoyed and digested and appreciated by adults just as much as children and Lois did a miracle no other writer in the history of the world ever did anything even close to what CS Lois did in The Chronicles of Narnia the most interesting character there is Jesus Christ of course it's Aslan but there are hundreds of books by Christians most of the Protestant fundamentalists who try to write fictional books about Jesus they're all embarrassingly bad don't don't don't read any of them it's impossible to take him seriously the Christ of the Gospels are so big and so impossible to to come up to and to imitate and to equal that you can't invent a character like that one of my strongest arguments for the reality of Christ the church is Christ the true Christ is no human being could possibly imagine that story certainly twelve bumbling Galilean fisherman couldn't where did that story come from if not from reality you can't imagine that and that's why you can't write more stories about Christ nor fiction about Christ Lois did when you read The Chronicles of Narnia and you meet as one what happens something happens in your heart in your spirit which is unique he somehow enables you to spontaneously feel towards haslin the same complex and unique emotion that people who met Jesus in the Gospels felt when they first met him Aslan is not comfortable he's a lion he's terrifying but he's good so good that in him is all our hope but usually we think of things that are terrible and fearful as bad and usually we think of things that are good as comforting and satisfying no not at me nope he's just like Christ how did Lewis do it well it's fantasy so he creeps past the watchful dragons of familiarity Narnia is another world it's Jesus to be a lion and duty you feel a duty to feel certain ways towards the Christ of the Gospels and and duty paralyzes Spontini the Lewis received quite a few letters from children saying I loved your Chronicles of Narnia but I feel guilty because I think I love Aslan more than I love Jesus and Lois says don't feel guilty as it is Jesus it's a masterpiece all seven of them category five supernatural fantasy includes another masterpiece by Louis what Louis did in the Great Divorce is basically what Dante did in the Divine Comedy but it's much shorter it's much clearer it transcends the culture five hundred years from now you won't have to do a lot of historical research to find out what politicians Lewis is satirizing as you do for Dante in the Divine Comedy I know the Divine Comedy is a great book but it's not easily accessible on first reading the great divorce is same thing trip from Hell to heaven and what's great about the Divine Comedy is you can identify with all those characters the Saints in the Centers it's universal human you do the same thing the Great Divorce the plot is basically a busload of travelers from Hell is allowed to visit heaven the outskirts of heaven and choose to either stay there go back to hell all but one choose to go back to hell it's a great satire it's funny as well as terribly serious and it shows you yourself and your own follies it's not really speculation about the next world that's fantasy what do we know about the next world very little the best description of it in the Bible is is not seen ear has not heard nor has it entered into the heart of man the things that God has prepared for the so the point is not a speculation about what you're gonna meet after death the point is what you're doing right now and just as Thorton Wilder turns things around and looks at life from the viewpoint of death so Lewis turned things around and looked at this world from the viewpoint of the next I've seen this performed as a play four times in four different cities by four different sets of players four four very different audiences every single time I heard how effective the play was as a college professor I'm very sensitive to noise in the audience and I know when I'm boring people the papers are shuffling and feet are moving and they can't wait to get out of the classroom ordinarily it's just a little bit of that noise and that's ordinary level when I say something really interesting the noise stops like now but maybe once a year maybe less than that maybe once every two or three years I'll say something so arresting that they'll not only stop moving they'll stop breathing literally stopped breathing for five seconds one two three four five it's easy to stop breathing for five seconds that you don't usually do it and I can hear the difference and every single time I've seen this play performed I've heard the audience stop breathing a couple times it's an amazing book the other supernatural fantasy by Louis is the Screwtape Letters which also turns things upside down because it's a series probably you know that's even if you haven't read it a series of letters from a senior devil to a junior devil about how to tempt humankind that is us I seriously believe that the Screwtape Letters will be recognized as one of the great spiritual classics in literature for the next thousands of years the practical advice about faith and unfaith and and hope and despair and charity and and and egotism and the the clever ways that satan enables us to deceive ourselves you learn an immense amount of practical religious wisdom in the Screwtape Letters and it's funny the funny in the series aren't necessarily opposite lewis's once asked the question do you think that heaven will be funny or serious and he said that question is not serious it's funny category six science fiction not everybody's cup of tea I don't particularly like technological science-fiction myself because technology sort of bores me as mathematics does that's neither a virtue nor a vise however here are two certainly great science fiction classics each of which has been not only in print but very very popular ever since it was written the first one is fifty years old the second one is almost 100 years old a canticle for Leibowitz is certainly the most catholic science fiction story ever written CS lewis thought it was the greatest science fiction novel ever written I agree with him the hero is the Catholic Church which survives apocalypse and nuclear war and the background theme is very dusty epstein that is man is an original sinner and capable of insane feats of self delusion and self-destruction yet God providentially brings good out of evil and and and redeems in utterly unpredictable ways it's a philosophy of history it's a sprawling novel that covers about a thousand years of history and yet it's pretty short only about 200 pages long the other science fiction novel I recommend is probably the most prophetic book of the twenty trained namely brave new world by Aldous Huxley written in 1932 it reads as if it was written yesterday we are living in brave new world and it's about the destruction of the family and marriage and human sexuality and the destruction of any culture that's not uniformly approved by the the all-knowing powers that means and the conflict in break the world is again a reversal because at first the reader is introduced to this brave new world of the future brave new world is basically let's say brave the world is to Sweden what Sweden is to say here that is it's not really happy it's just stable and into this has introduced a savage from an Indian Reservation and from the viewpoint of brave the world the savages absurd he wants to suffer he wants to have his heart broken he wants Shakespeare and he wants Beethoven and he can't get them and then you realize that you have the choice between being the Savage and being a citizen of this peaceful and soulless brave new world it's just an astonishingly prophetic book seventh category spirituality I picked here not the two greatest books of all time but the two that were the most helpful to me because I'm very simple-minded and I'm lazy and I like short books and I like simple books and brother Lawrence's little book the practice of the presence of God centers in on the single thing that I think makes a saint more effectively than anything which is the title when you are in the presence of God you don't want to deceive yourself you don't want to be an egotistic fool you don't want to forget who you are what the meaning of your life is but God is in fact present all the time totally really in many ways in your life so that's the kind of skeleton key that opens up all the other doors and it's a very simple point and beautifully put by a by a very holy and very humble monk the other book that's also very holy and humble but much more demanding and difficult and is more about the will and total charity than it is about the mind and total sanity both of which are very good things is the autobiography you've seen two recently so the story of the soul she's one of the most popular of all modern Saints because well she's just as saintly as you can get I guess I don't know how else to say it it's a book that will change you no matter what level of sanctity you're on the lowest of the highest and it's a narrative not a spectacular narrative but very personal so it's not abstract theory is very very concrete practice each category apologetics apologetics is basically our obedience to the command of st. Peter the first pope in a letter to be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you so giving reasons for faith in my experience of teaching philosophy and philosophy of religion and religious philosophy and apologetics in many different ways to many different students I find that Pascal's Ponce's is the single most effective way to get at the typical modern pagan who doesn't really care very much about religion it's simply a series of notes that Pascal was planning to put into a book in a logical order and died before he could but the notes are better than the book would be there are a series of arrows that strike them in art I noticed that when whenever students read certain chapters in the mozzies which is a which are strikingly modern even though the book was written four hundred years ago they say oops that's me see so this is the problem of pain is a probably more difficult book than any of the others that I've mentioned so far because it's a rather tight and logical argument it's not abstract and theoretical but it's it's a short book it could have easily been three or four times as long but it's about the most obvious difficulty that anybody of religious faith has namely the problem of evil if God is all good and all-powerful and all-loving why is there so much evil and suffering and injustice in human life that's probably the strongest argument for atheism and this is to my mind a clearest and strongest answer to it that I've ever read it also has a couple of speculative chapters towards the end one on heaven and one on Hell that are the best summary that I've ever read in a short compass of what to expect in those two places my ninth category philosophy is what I teach most of the time and if I were to select just two classics that are so fundamental that you can't understand philosophy without them I'd pick first of all the apology of Socrates by Plato Socrates is the great granddaddy of all philosophers and this is basically a defense not just of Socrates but a philosophy he's about to be executed for the crime of being a philosopher and he explains and defends his life and even if you're not a professional philosopher you better be a philosopher because the philosopher is a lover of what and wisdom is a divine attribute in Augustine's Confessions there's really three conversions that are related the first one even before he becomes a Christian is when he reads Cicero's version of the apology and converts the philosophy wisdom is an absolute I devote my my whole life to wisdom this is first absolute doesn't even know wisdom is divine then the next conversion is his conversion to Christianity intellectually all the arguments are answered the third conversion the scene in the garden is converting morally the conversion of will that completes it but the apology of Socrates is basic without that you don't have philosophy without philosophy you don't have the love of wisdom without the love of wisdom you don't have wisdom without wisdom you don't have sanctity or civilization boethius's the consolation of philosophy is written about a century after agustin at the beginning of the Middle Ages but it's a very popular book like Socrates boëthius is about to be killed by a wicked politician who doesn't like boys this is politics and he's in prison and this is his last speech what what can philosophy tell you about the meaning of life and death and divine providence in the light of your impending death it's a very simple very poetic and very short book it completes the apology of Socrates some of the best philosophers are not professional philosophers but popular philosophers and one of the greatest minds of all time I am convinced as GK Chesterton he's a great novelist he's a great essayist it was a great journalist but he's not usually classified as a philosopher he never even went to the University but then neither did Socrates university wasn't invented until his disciple Plato invented it but two of the books of Chesterton I would say are the two best popular philosophy books I've seen one is his introduction to Thomas Aquinas whom I would classify as the most intelligent human being who ever lived next to Jesus Christ and the greatest Thomas philosophers of the 20th century have all said that this is the best book anybody ever wrote about Thomas clay is a very simple a very engaging one orthodoxy is unclassifiable in that sense it's a very unorthodox book but it could be classified as a book of apologetics it's about Chesterton's faith in distinction to a whole bunch of modern heresies but it's written in such a rush like a surprising way that nobody can turn you upside down better than gesture did he shows you that you are in fact standing on your head so when he turned you upside down he's turning you from insanity to sanity it's also a hilariously funny book funny not in the sense of bawdy humor or jokes but in the sense that things are pretty much the opposite of what they can see I think I've done a fairly good job of telling you what each of the other books is about but it's impossible Roxie's about it's about everything it's it's a masterpiece I once received in the mail a large piece of paper the size of a newspaper and somebody some guy with a lot of extra money had read orthodoxy and said this is the greatest book ever written so I am going to print out I think it was half a million copies and send them cheap in the mail to everybody that I know and that's we did it was small print but you could fit the whole thing on two sides of a newspaper it's a fairly short book but for somebody to do that is to say this is a remarkable and unique book history if you can't yesterday another selection of Chesterton wrote the everlasting man which is about the difference Jesus Christ made to history let me just quote one sentence from it here's a summary of the history of Western civilization paganism was the biggest thing in the world Christianity was bigger everything since has been pretty small it's the big picture of history the second book here is this probably one that nobody here is read in fact I think it's out of print but it's an absolutely spectacular little book it focuses on one incident in history which is probably more important than most of you realized the Americas North and South America are both dedicated to and under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary why because of a miracle of Guadalupe more people visit Juan Diego's tilma in Mexico City and the other holy site in the world and Warren Carroll tells the story of one Lupe and the story of Cortez and the Aztecs which come before quite a little pay in a way that most historians don't it's though it's not scholarly it's spectacular it seems almost like fantasy or science fiction but it's literally true and he bases his account on the actual diary of Bernal Diaz who was Cortez's companion and and diarist it's just a spectacular story of good and evil and and miracles arresting category 12 theology here I'll give you probably the simplest and probably the most advanced books of theology that I know CS Lewis's mere christianity has probably done more for mutual understanding among different Christians Roman Catholics Eastern Orthodox Anglican and Protestant than any other book ever written everybody loves it and it's clear it's simple and yet it's inexhaustible it's like the Bible that way you read it the first time you say I got it you read it the second time you say oh there's more to it by the tenth time you say wow how much more could there be to that this is such a simple book amazingly clear the sympathia lines you see a low-key a most people say this and was so much Theologica it's about 4,000 pages long it's worth browsing through but it needs to be condensed and it needs to be edited so I've done two versions of that edited means footnotes explaining the technical terms and people have surprised me by buying a lot of copies of my version of the Summa not just in college in fact I don't think many people do use it in college this is a book that ordinary people buy and read and understand and say wow I never thought I could understand Aquinas now I do he's really quite simple and direct once you understand a couple technical terms you're off and running so sample this it's probably the greatest work of theology ever finally poetry two of my favorites they look very very different are a short poem by G K Chesterton called Lepanto which is about the repelling of the Muslim invasion in the 15th century miraculously if you like poetry because you like to hear music in words if you like the the union of sound and sense Lepanto is great if you prefer modern poetry which doesn't have much sound and doesn't have much sense well you won't like Lepanto but it's especially good for for teenagers or very sensitive to body language and sound TS Eliot's the wasteland is not nearly as beautiful but it's quite profound it's rather obscure in fact but it's it's memorable and haunting and it's utterly relevant it's about the modern post-christian world well there you are 26 of them 26 readable books every Catholic should read but actually only 11 of the 26 were written by Catholics let's see I've got eleven by Catholics nine by Anglicans two by Protestants to my agnostics one by Eastern Orthodox and one by a call a pagan theist Socrates CS Lewis was mentioned six times couldn't help it sorry Justin in four times there are many other books I could add I mean we're gonna have the most interesting part of my talk now I'm gonna shut up and you're gonna ask me questions but one of the questions is certainly going to be if you can have a third choice what would you add so I'll answer that question right off 1/3 autobiography I would is either thomas merton 7-story mountain or CS lewis is surprised by joy a third novel i would add is Dickens A Tale of Two Cities a third play I would add is Shakespeare's Hamlet probably greatest play ever written by the way it's fairly short and the great millions of books have been written and yet next to the Bible there are more quotations from this short play in Bartlett's familiar quotations than any other book ever written that's how memorable the language is if I were to add another epic I would add Tolkien Silmarillion it's the prequel to or the big picture surrounding Lord of the Rings if I were to add another supernatural fantasy I would add Charles Williams book a descent into hell which is the most terrifying book I have ever written a written read Freudian slip the point of the title is the protagonist descends into hell during this world during this life and the psychology of damnation is very convincing if you didn't believe in Hell you didn't believe that anybody could go there read that book if I were to add another science fiction classic it would probably be Ray Bradbury the Martian Chronicles if I were to add another book of spirituality it would be decodes abandonment to divine providence if I were to add another book of apologetics gee I already said mere christianity what I'm gonna gonna say well it was his miracles when Thomas Aquinas at the beginning of the Summa establishes that God exists and therefore theology is possible plus it's the foundation of the next 4,000 pages he has only two objections to the existence of God and throughout history there have been only two strong arguments for atheism on every other issue he has at least three objections but you can only find two to this most important of all questions one of them is the problem of evil and the other it is the apparent adequacy of the natural and human sciences to explain everything without any supernatural God and mirror Louis's defense of miracles as an answer to that objection it is a deep many layers book but it's fairly difficult and fairly profound so that's kind of another level if I were to add one more book of classic philosophy it would have to be Plato's Republic if I were to add another book of popular philosophy it would be Aristotle's ethics I once met a guy who said I bet you can't tell where I teach philosophy I said we'll tell me he said on the streets of New York City every summer to the homeless I said good for you he said I bet you don't know what their favorite book is I said what he said Aristotle's ethics it's very practical if you know the homeless love it well that card was rubber meets the road if I were to add something else in history it would be either Agustin's classic the City of God get a shortened version it's about a thousand pages long or something by Christopher Dawson I think is the best historian of modern times if I were to add another book of theology at the our present time and culture I would say get something by Christopher West on Saint John Paul the seconds theology of the body which is the church's definitive answer to the sexual revolution which is the most powerful weapon that Satan has of destroying our culture and civilization George Michael the Pope's biographer says this is the most important development in Catholic theology for 700 years finally if I were to add another poem I would say st. John Henry Newman the dream of morangias which is about dying and going to heaven well I finished in less than an hour I was going to take 45 minutes so that's not too bad and we don't have a terribly crushing time limit so I think there's a lot of time for questions now I am always very impressed by Catholic audiences because you politely sit through a monologue which is always dull just so you can get to the Q&A which is always interesting and that's because you believe in purgatory so your purgatory is over you haven't begins

Channel: Immaculata Classical Academy

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Id: bLm5RggbhlE

Length: 54min 3sec (3243 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 03 2017