If you can read only one book this year, make it Eric Metaxas’ biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.Biography is unique because it has so many implicit benefits. As John Piper observes: “Good biography is history and guards us against chronological snobbery (as CS Lewis calls it). It is also theology – the most powerful kind – because it bursts forth from the lives of people. It is also adventure and suspense, for which we have a natural hunger. It is psychology and personal experience, which deepen our understanding of human nature (especially ourselves). Good biographies of great Christians make for remarkably efficient reading...

The most thought-provoking book I’ve read so far this year is James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom. (Thanks to Jon Wymer for the recommendation). Every discerning Christian ought to put this book on their reading list.Smith is a professor of philosophy at Calvin College and an astute observer of cultural postmodernism. His book is fascinating to read but hard to describe – mainly because he’s laboring to dismantle our philosophical assumptions about education, worship, and culture. Desiring the Kingdom is Dallas Willard meets Tim Keller meets Jonathan Edwards. It is, in the language of the book jacket, a paradigm-bending attempt to “provide a comprehensive theology of culture… [focused] around the themes of liturgy, formation, and desire.”

“The first to plead his case seems right, until another comes and examines him” (Proverbs 18:17).A reverence for the book of Proverbs and a disdain for weak argumentation have built in me a penchant for the primary sources. I want to hear the best arguments against Christianity. I want to know what the most skilled objectors are saying. So when an editor at HarperOne invited me to review an advance copy of Bart Ehrman’s forthcoming book Forged, I gladly obliged.