Scott, over at Grace is Unfair, asked his readers for book recommendations. Since Tom has asked for a list of readables from us, I thought I’d double-dip my recommendations here. This is not a list of essential books, nor the most influential books I have read. Instead, they are some good books that will help round any person.
Religious Studies
Gods of the City, edited by Robert Orsi - This is a collection of essays and case studies done on religious people in cities. It touches on all kinds of topics. There is a study of a Hindu temple in DC, a absolutely fascinating look at racial construction through a study of the Italian Harlem, the sacralizatrion of secular space by the Salvation Army, and the Japanese Presbyterian Church among others. (I have this book – can lend)
Playing Indian by Philip Deloria We constructed "Cowboys and Indians.
Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa by David Chidester: You will be blown away by this book. The anchor. The power of religion in defining the other. (can lend)
Early Christianity
Women and Christian Origins, by Ross Shepard Kraemer (Editor), Mary Rose D’Angelo (Editor) Another collection of essays; this time on women in early Christianity. Some are good essays, such as real women in the undisputed letters of Paul. Others are not so good, such as (I have this book – can lend, but I use it a lot)
The First Urban Christians by Wayne A. Meeks - Meeks looks at the earliest Xian documents (the letters of Paul) to describe tensions and texture of the first Christians, which were found in cities. The introduction is a pretty good description of NT scholarship in its own right.
In Memory of Her by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza This is a controversial work, but the best of trustful feminist scholarship. Schüssler Fiorenza is a hard-nosed german new testament scholar who teaches at Harvard. This work is an excellent sociological and exegetical study of the earliest Christians. She does not damn nor whitewash Paul – a rare thing in any scholarship on the subject.
The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles translated by William Wright. This is a interesting and sometimes unintentionally hilarious collection of Syrian acts of the apostles. It isn’t all of them (no Acts of Peter, for instance), but it will give you an idea of what popular Christians were consuming and producing at the time. (as opposed to the official story of the early church fathers) This work is over 130 years old and now in the public domain. I made a copy of it on lulu which I think you might like rather than the huge volume that also contains the Syriac manuscripts tradition.
Religious History
Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown
The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism by Harry S. Stout
