So I approve of this challenge.

Also, if you haven’t gotten around to it, this challenge would be a good time for anybody to read “He Is There and He Is Not Silent” by Francis A. Schaeffer. It’s the book that Eli the preacher gave us at one of the SHAFT meetings last semester

I do agree that Brothers was wonderful. I liked Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” as well.

Machuga’s In Defense of the Soul is a great little book, accessible and thoughtful. It is basically an argument against materialism and for a teleological understanding of the world. Before you dismiss classical metaphysics (Aristotle), you should read a book like this.

That book is all head. If you want a “heart” book, read Richard John Neuhaus’ ‘Death on a Friday Afternoon’. One of my favorite contemporary books. It is a very penetrating meditation on the ‘seven last words’ of Jesus. As he says: “If what Christians say about Good Friday is true, then it is, quite simply, the truth about everything. I have written this for people who are convinced of that truth, for people who are open to thinking about whether it may be true and for people who are just curious about why so much of the world thinks Good Friday is the key to understanding what Dante called ‘the love that moves the sun and all the other stars’.
A great book, I read it every Lent (which begins on Ash Wednesday which is Feb 17) so it is a timely suggestion too.

it might be more approachable if you read it while taking the same drugs she was on when she wrote it…

http://www.life.com/image/50334065/in-gallery/38742/famous-literary-drunks–addicts

I might read something by Aristotle, myself – the Sigmund Freud of Physics if you will whose reputation put physics in the dark ages for 2000 years (Psychology was only marred by Freud for a handful of decades by comparison). Why detest contemporaries when you can hate the classics…

As a (mostly) unaligned monotheist, I request a few suggestions by the atheists of SHAFT. Please, I prefer to read books by dead people.

I think it’d be too easy to read Beck or Crichton. Reading them wouldn’t challenge me, because they just frankly aren’t challenging thinkers. It’d actually be fun and amusing to read either Beck or Crichton. Reading a dumb book you disagree with is essentially the same as reading a book you agree with.

That said, I don’t know yet what I’ll read. Probably some conservative economic thinker, like Hayek. I trust (and hope), though, that Prof. Kleiner will recommend a theist book or two. He’s fond of Machuga’s “In Defense of the Soul,” so maybe I’ll check that out.