The City of God
426 · 912 pages
Rome fell to the Goths in 410 and pagans blamed the Christians. Augustine answers by sorting all history into two cities, one built on love of God and one on love of self.
★ 7.5
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Summa Theologica
1274 · 432 pages
Aquinas asks thousands of questions about God, law, virtue, and sin, and answers each only after stating the strongest case against himself. Catholic thought has been arguing with him for 750 years.
★ 7.4
Institutes of the Christian Religion
1536 · 1059 pages
Calvin set all of Protestant belief in order: who God is, what humanity became, and how grace arrives unearned to those God has chosen. Reformed churches have run on this book ever since.
★ 6.8
On the Bondage of the Will
1525 · 328 pages
Erasmus said the will helps choose salvation. Luther answered that it is a beast ridden by God or Satan, never choosing its rider. Protestants have argued about grace on his terms ever since.
★ 6.8
The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr
1971 · 264 pages
Niebuhr's argument: an individual can rise above self-interest and a nation cannot, so justice comes from power balanced against power. Cold War strategists and Martin Luther King alike thought in his terms.
★ 6.6
Revelations of Divine Love
1395 · 288 pages
The earliest surviving English book by a woman came from an anchoress sealed into a cell beside a Norwich church. Julian saw all creation lying in her palm, small as a hazelnut.
★ 6.5
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
1135 · 296 pages
Heloise wrote to Abelard, the Paris philosopher who had been her tutor and lover, years after her uncle's men castrated him. From her abbey she refused to call their love a sin.
★ 6.5
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and Other Writings
1741 · 208 pages
Standing before a Connecticut congregation in 1741, Edwards said God holds sinners over hell as one holds a spider over a fire. The moaning grew so loud he had to pause.
★ 6.1