{"id":408,"date":"2006-12-18T14:27:10","date_gmt":"2006-12-18T12:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/2006\/12\/18\/influential-books\/"},"modified":"2006-12-18T14:27:10","modified_gmt":"2006-12-18T12:27:10","slug":"influential-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/2006\/12\/18\/influential-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Influential Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are so many books out there that it is easy to read whatever catches your attention or happens to be handy. I think it’s better to be strategic about our reading. Have you ever planned a year in advance what you are going to read? At least, I would suggest that you develop a partial list that allows for a few other things as they are brought to your attention. <\/p>\n

One way to determine what books are best is to ask people you respect for the books that have influenced them the most. The internet makes that a bit easier and I did a little bit of looking for you. <\/p>\n

John MacArthur is a pastor and college president in southern California and his list<\/a> is short and includes Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, <\/em>about which I once heard MacArthur say tha\"mcclain.jpg\"<\/a>t he would buy it for anyone on the faculty if they promised to read it. (I bought it myself and haven’t read it yet.) <\/p>\n

John Piper, a pastor in Minnesota, has a longer list<\/a> with some explanations. It is dated (1993) and less valuable to me than some of the others I found. <\/p>\n

R.C. Sproul has a list of 16<\/a>, none of which I’ve read, but a few of which I’ve heard of. <\/p>\n

A few months ago, Christianity Today published their list of the Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals<\/a>, which includes as #1 a book no one has read. <\/p>\n

Sam Storms gives his list of the 15 books<\/a> that should<\/em> have been the most influential (the second list). <\/p>\n

Here’s a list by a bunch of random people<\/a>, but they seem to be pretty smart random people. <\/p>\n

And I found a whole book on the subject: Indelible Ink: 22 Prominent Christian Authors Discuss the Books That Shape Their Faith<\/a>. They include a summary of the results on this page<\/a>. (Here’s the Amazon link<\/a>.) <\/p>\n

Know of any other lists?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are so many books out there that it is easy to read whatever catches your attention or happens to be handy. I think it’s better to be strategic about our reading. Have you ever planned a year in advance what you are going to read? At least, I would suggest that you develop a\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}