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086 | The Ultimate Church History Book List
524 Plays2 years ago
At long last Phylicia compiled ALL her favorite church history books into a massive book list - for adults and kids! From Butler's Lives of the Saints to Foxes Book of Martyrs and everything in between, you'll find a book that fits your Christian history interests and reading style. Links to books will be in shownotes soon!
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Purpose
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Verity Podcast. I'm your host, Felicia Mason-Heimer, and I am here to teach you how to know what you believe, to live it boldly, and to communicate it graciously to the world around you. I believe that women are ready to go deeper in their faith than ever before, and they don't have to go to seminary to do it. I am so glad you're here, and I hope you'll join me on this journey because every woman is a theologian.
Conference Announcement
00:00:30
Speaker
Hi friends, welcome back to this week's episode of Verity Podcast. It's a big week here at the Mason-Heimer House because every woman, a theologian's team is all here in Petoskey, almost all of us anyway, working to get ready for Verity Conference, which is this coming weekend, November 4th and 5th. So we are working overtime this week to get
00:00:52
Speaker
everything ready for the almost 300 women who are coming to Petoskey for the conference. We are so excited to see you and meet you. And next week's episode, if everything goes according to plan, will actually be the audio from one of the sessions at this week's conference.
Book List Episode Idea
00:01:11
Speaker
As we look forward to that, I was thinking, what episode can I launch this week that is not going to take a ton of preparation work from me, but is still going to be helpful to our listeners? And it dawned on me, I have not done a book list episode on church history.
00:01:31
Speaker
and I cannot believe that I have not done this, but here we go. I'm going to give you my massive list of church history books and I would say church history adjacent books because when I went through my library compiling all the books I wanted to share with you, I had a really hard time choosing
00:01:53
Speaker
And I started going, well, this would kind of count as church history. I mean, it talks about history when it talks about this issue. I had to kind of stop myself from getting a little too crazy on this. And even so, with my self-control, I have probably 12 or 15 books here.
00:02:12
Speaker
In order to make this episode actually 30 minutes instead of 40 minutes, like last week's episode, I am going to get started. I also have a bunch of books for adults on church history, but I also have a couple for kids. So I want to share those as well. And actually let's start with the resources for kids because that list is a lot shorter. And some of these kids resources are actually great for adults too, because I have found that as I teach my kids about church history,
00:02:42
Speaker
I'm a lot more likely to internalize it for myself. Now, we are going to be compiling all of these in the show notes. But just so you know, we're a little bit behind. I'm getting the show notes up on the website right now as I'm recording. So I'm recording at
Book Links and Alternatives
00:03:00
Speaker
the end of October 2022. We hope to start getting the show notes updated and on the website with links to books, etc. in the latter half of November. So after
00:03:11
Speaker
Verity conference after the November Every Woman a Theologian shop launch after those things have happened, we will start to work on updating the website with the show notes and with the links to all of these. So in the meantime, what you can do is listen closely and then go to Amazon and you can look up the titles and the author's names and they will come right up. Also, if you don't want to support Amazon, which Josh and I don't love supporting them,
00:03:39
Speaker
I highly recommend utilizing Christian Book. They're a great company to support. You can also utilize Abe Books or Thrift Books to get discounted versions of these books as well. You can check Libby is another great resource. It's a library app that will link to your local library and you can sometimes get ebook versions or audio versions.
00:04:02
Speaker
Most of the books I'm sharing with you are not going to be on audio and a lot of them may not be on ebook, but you can sometimes find them through Libby or your local library. And don't forget that most libraries have an interlibrary loan where you can actually ship in books from university libraries in your state if you're in the United States.
00:04:22
Speaker
So I can actually get books that are harder to access at my local library. There's not a really big Christian or religious section in my library. So I can actually get books shipped in from downstate where there are a lot of Christian colleges and seminaries. And so you may have that option as well.
Children's Historical Teachings
00:04:40
Speaker
So let's start with the kids' church history books first.
00:04:45
Speaker
Let me move my giant stack of 1500 books here. The first series I want to share with you is called Hero Tales by Dave Anita Jackson. My library actually had these and I'm using them to teach about Martin Luther this week in our daughter's homeschool curriculum. I actually grew up on these books and it dawned on me when I saw the cover. You know when you get that flashback and you're like, whoa, I know that book.
00:05:12
Speaker
Hero Tales is what it's called. And what's cool about it is they tell the story of the particular person in church history in a really approachable way. It's kind of like a living book, if you will. The story's really almost not fictionalized, but kind of it's written like a story.
00:05:29
Speaker
And then at the end, it has a From God's Word section that has a relevant Bible verse, and then a Let's Talk About section that looks at different questions you can ask the child about the story that they read.
00:05:44
Speaker
Volume one, they have a really wide range of people. I was really impressed. So they have a bunch of missionaries, Gladys Aylward, Amy Carmichael, Adiniram Judson, David Livingstone. Then they have Martin Luther, a reformer, Dwight Moody, who is an evangelist, Samuel Morris, evangelist from Africa.
00:06:06
Speaker
Meno Simons, which I was surprised he was in there, and a lot of people don't learn about Anabaptist history, but he is the founder of the Mennonite, so he's in here too. Harriet Tubman, William Tyndale, and John Wesley. So a really wide variety in volume one. And then in volume two...
00:06:24
Speaker
We have Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Bunyan, Jim Elliott, Festo Kivengehr. I'm not sure I pronounced his name right. He's Africa's Apostle, Eric Little, Watchman Knee, Cameron Townsend, Cory Ten Boom. So a really wide variety. I'm pleased.
00:06:44
Speaker
with the variety they have for as old as this book is that they're pulling people in church history from around the world, as well as people who did different things in church history. So Bible translators, evangelists, missionaries, pastors, et cetera, and men and women. So these books are probably from
00:07:06
Speaker
the late 90s or early 2000s, but they are really well done. They may have done a volume three, I'm not sure, but I only know of volumes one and two. So that's Hero Tales by Dave and Nita Jackson.
00:07:18
Speaker
Okay, the next two books are books about saints. And I want to give a little caveat as I talk about these. So Josh and I are not Catholic. We live in a highly Catholic area, grew up with many Catholic friends. I'm pretty familiar with Catholic theology. If you've listened to my episodes about topics related to Catholicism, you know that while I do believe that people may be Christian and Catholic, I have significant disagreements with
00:07:45
Speaker
Catholic theology and will never be converting to Catholicism. We do celebrate All Saints Day every year and we follow the Lutheran liturgical calendar. So when Luther broke from the Catholic Church, he kind of whittled down the Catholic Church calendar to the Saints Days that reflected the biblical patriarchs.
00:08:11
Speaker
and the disciples of Jesus. So he got rid of a lot of the extra saint's days because there were so many saint's days throughout the year in the Catholic calendar and there still are. So
00:08:23
Speaker
I appreciate, though, that the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church really do a good job of bringing history into worship and really bringing the history of people who followed God into everyday life. And so I do use Catholic resources for teaching about people in history. I just focus mainly on the people
00:08:50
Speaker
in history who adhered closely to scriptural Christianity, so biblical Christianity, or people who are actually in the Bible. So St. Stephen, St. Paul, St. Matthew, Moses, Joseph, all of those people, those are my main focus. And then people who have confirmed holy lives that were based on scripture, St. Benedict, St. Francis, St. Catherine, like there's
00:09:18
Speaker
There's a variety of people in history who the Catholic Church has recorded, or the Orthodox Church has recorded, and the Protestant Church has largely forgotten. And so Protestant means non-Catholic Church. And so I do utilize a book called The Book of Saints by Loyola Kidd. So Loyola Press is a Catholic Press. And I just pick and choose which stories I focus on. So I have dog-eared here, St. Patrick, Joan of Arc,
00:09:46
Speaker
Elizabeth of Hungary, Perpetua. Some of you know that our cat is named Perpetua. And then a couple of the other saints from earlier on, Saint John of the Cross, etc. So this book is really nice and accessible. There's just some saints that I would say,
00:10:05
Speaker
I'm not sure I agree with the criteria for them being sainted or I'm not sure I agree with the legends around them. It seems like maybe there's some sensationalism there. And so I just won't utilize those stories. I'll utilize the ones that are more rooted in true historical fact. So Book of Saints by Loyola Kids.
00:10:25
Speaker
The next book is called 100 Saints, a Treasury of their Lives and Times by Malcolm Day.
Discussion on '100 Saints' Book
00:10:32
Speaker
And this book has all of the saints divided up into sections based on essentially
00:10:41
Speaker
the way they contributed to the church. So he's divided it up into family and home, for example, suffering, disaster and rescue, mission and travel, society,
00:10:58
Speaker
and animals, plants, and nature. So these particular Christians in history had some kind of specialty or passion for that area. And what I like about this book is it describes who the saint is. I'm looking at Jerome right now. And it has listed out their feast day, their symbols and art,
00:11:20
Speaker
paintings, famous paintings that they are in, their overall profile, like what did they do? So Jerome was a soldier turned priest who built orphanages and founded an institution for the care of abandoned children. Really straightforward. And then it will have pictures next to the story, famous art pieces that depict the person, little like
00:11:42
Speaker
cameos with more information about them, including the year that they lived and died. So this is a really great resource. It's really pretty. This would be a visual book for kids and adults both. And I love art and I especially love Christian art. So I like seeing the paintings that these saints, these Christians are depicted in because I can kind of place them when I see that art piece
00:12:11
Speaker
somewhere else or in a museum. So that is a treasury of the saints. There are 100 saints their lives and times.
00:12:19
Speaker
The last resource I want to mention for you is by YWAM Publishing, so Youth with a Mission, and whatever your opinions of Youth with a Mission as a whole, YWAM Publishing has a fantastic series of books called Christian Heroes Then and Now, and it's very extensive.
00:12:41
Speaker
It goes over a wild amount of people and a span of time. And what I love is that these books are written in such an approachable and fun manner. They're great chapter books for your middling readers, your pre-teens, and even as an adult reading them aloud to my kids, they're fantastic. So I'm just on the YWAM publishing website right now, and they have one on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Elizabeth Elliott, David Livingstone.
00:13:09
Speaker
DL Moody, Corey Ten Boom, Cameron Townsend, CS Lewis, Brother Andrew, Amy Carmichael, et cetera, et cetera. And you can get these on Amazon or you can get them on Christian Book. A lot of times you'll see these for sale as a set. Sometimes you can get them secondhand. There's so many of them and they are really, really well done. So they span
00:13:36
Speaker
I would say most of the middling history, so from like the Reformation forward, is where most of these books concentrate. There isn't a whole lot written about the early church, but I have another resource for that.
00:13:52
Speaker
So my last resource for kids is actually from our own shop, the Every Woman a Theologian Shop. If you head to FeliciaMasonheimer.com under Faithful Kids, which is our kids line, we have two different activity books for church history. One is for the early church. We have five church mothers and five church fathers with a little description of each, and it's a coloring book with stickers and activities.
00:14:18
Speaker
And then we also have the medieval church mothers and fathers, which came out earlier this year. And then we have a set of cards with a little bit longer descriptions. And you can use these at mealtime to talk about these different church heroes. So the cards are their own thing. And then we also have the activity books. So you can grab those on our website, FeliciaMasonHeimer.com under faithful kids if you want something that concentrates more on the early and medieval church at a children's level.
Conference Speakers Overview
00:14:49
Speaker
after a three year hiatus, Verity Conference is back and it's coming to Petoskey, Michigan, November 4th and 5th. I am so thrilled to bring back Verity Conference after our short break of a few years for COVID. And this time we are much bigger with two amazing speakers joining me to talk about apologetics and evangelism. How do we share our faith effectively in today's culture
00:15:16
Speaker
in a way that is both gracious and truthful. You'll hear from me, Jeremy Jenkins of All Things All People, and Priscellis Dominguez, who is going to share with us how to love other people while also speaking the truth. Jeremy specializes in world religions and cults, and he will be talking about evangelism in that context. I am so excited for this event. I hope you can join us. You can grab the remaining early bird tickets on my website, feliciamasonheimer.com, if you click the conference tab.
00:15:46
Speaker
Okay, let's go on to the adult books because I have to cruise really fast through these in order to give you the full extent of everything I have for you. So these are in no specific order, but they're all amazing. I'm going to start with a book that's really not so much about church history itself, as it is about history and Christianity.
00:16:08
Speaker
in general. So this book is called History and Christianity by John Warwick Montgomery. It is one of my top 10 books of all time. It's very small and it talks about the New Testament documents, the authority of Scripture, and how historians actually make one of the best appeals for the authenticity of Christianity. I found this book secondhand somewhere
00:16:36
Speaker
And I had never heard of this author before. I had never heard of...
00:16:42
Speaker
what his work was, but apparently he was an associate of C.S. Lewis. And this little book is just fantastic. I think it may have a different name when you buy it, like on thrift books. It's not on Amazon. It hasn't been updated. But History and Christianity by John Warwick Montgomery will just give you this idea of how Christianity has moved through history and why it's something that we can trust.
00:17:09
Speaker
The second book I want to share with you is a
'Fox's Book of Martyrs' Overview
00:17:12
Speaker
classic. It is called Fox's Book of Martyrs. And this is written by John Fox. John Fox was born in 1516 in England. And in 1545, he became a Protestant and had to resign from the university where he was working attending.
00:17:32
Speaker
and flee from England because at that point, I believe Queen Mary, a little bit after that, Queen Mary, who was Catholic, some of you know her from history, she was called Bloody Mary because she wanted to kill all the Protestants, forced John Fox to leave England. But while he was on the continent of Europe, he was writing his book that became known as Fox's Book of Martyrs. At the time, it was called The Acts and Monuments of These Letter and Perilous Days.
00:18:01
Speaker
we call it the Book of Martyrs. And what this book details is the persecution and suffering of people who followed Jesus. Some of the people recorded in here are people who were recent to John Fox, like Wycliffe and Tyndale, and even Martin Luther is included in here. Even though Martin Luther wasn't martyred, he was a follower of Christ and his story is in here too.
00:18:24
Speaker
I remember stealing Fox's Book of Martyrs from my mom's shelf as a 12-year-old and reading through the really gruesome burnings at the stake and stuff like the whimsical and fun child that I was. So there's some things in here that are a little disturbing, but I think it gives us
00:18:45
Speaker
kind of a respect for what our forefathers went through to give us scripture and to give us the Christianity that we have today. So this can be found anywhere you want to buy your books because they have updated it and reprinted it over the course of history.
00:19:03
Speaker
The next one is Know the Creed and Councils by Justin Holcomb. So this is a quick little book. Each chapter is pretty short. And I really love that because you can pick it up and put it down. And it basically just goes through the main creeds.
00:19:18
Speaker
Confessions and Councils with Christianity. I'm going to be doing some episodes about these. If you listen to the episode where I went through the five Christian creeds, a lot of that information is in this book too, where he talks about the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, etc. He goes on to talk about the Heidelberg Catechism, the Westminster Confession, Second Vatican Council, all sorts of really important pivotal points in church history. So that's in Know the Creeds and Councils by Justin Holcomb.
00:19:48
Speaker
Okay, this next book is one that I have referenced at times, but I haven't read it all the way through. And this is called Christianity and the Hellenistic World by Ronald Nash. This is an older book, but I have found it helpful when I want to know a little bit more about Greek culture.
00:20:09
Speaker
So one of the chapters I have referenced and found very helpful was called The Mystery Religions and Essential Christian Beliefs. So it says here,
00:20:39
Speaker
The next book I have for you is kind of similar to Fox's Book of Martyrs. This is called Butler's Lives of the Saints. And this book I use as a reference guide. It has been printed and reprinted. It was originally published in 1756, and then it's since been updated and, you know, moved forward through church history. So,
00:21:08
Speaker
This book, I appreciate because it gives little summaries of people in church history based on their saint day. So it's divided up into every month of the year. So for instance, I'm turning to May because my birthday is in May. Let's go to my birthday. It's May 5th.
00:21:30
Speaker
And May 5th is St. Hilary. So it has a whole section here on who St. Hilary was, when he lived, and what he did with his life. So Butler's Lives of the Saints is another one of those great reference books. If you just want something to read, you know, every day of the year, you can open it up and read about a different person in church history.
00:21:54
Speaker
All right, the next book is a textbook, and this is called Christianity Through the Centuries by Earl Cairns, a history of the Christian church. So I bought this and I was actually really stoked about it because I save up for these church history books because I love them. I'll be honest, I was a little disappointed by this, but I'll tell you why. It's because when I was in college studying religion and Christianity,
00:22:22
Speaker
I had as a textbook, Justo Gonzalez's Story of Christianity, parts one and two, which I'm going to talk about next. I was spoiled by that series. Justo Gonzalez is amazing and his writing is fantastic and relatable and yet so educational. And so no shade on Mr. Cairns, but this book is definitely written like a textbook.
00:22:48
Speaker
it is a lot harder to get into in my experience than Bruce Shelley's or Justo Gonzalez's work. So I will say it makes a good reference book because it's very nicely divided up. It has a lot of charts, has maps, has pictures, which both Bruce Shelley's work and Justo Gonzalez's don't have. So
00:23:11
Speaker
Pros of this resource, Christianity Through the Centuries, pictures, graphs, maps. Cons, it's boring. Okay, the next book is How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind by Thomas Oden, Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity. So I actually made it about a quarter of the way through this before I had to pause. I am coming back to it, but I had a deadline and I didn't get to finish it.
00:23:36
Speaker
This is a fantastic book, particularly if you are talking to people who believe that Christianity is the religion of the colonizers. Because what Thomas Oden has produced here is a defense for the African origin of Christianity.
00:23:54
Speaker
which is absolutely true. Christianity began in the Middle East and Africa and some of our best known early church fathers were African. Augustine, Athanasius, just to name a few. So this book is fantastic. It's very rich, but it's also pretty approachable. The chapters are pretty short, has good sections kind of broken down, which I think makes it easier to move through a book like this because it
00:24:22
Speaker
When you're reading history, it can get really dense. So I like to read short chapters and then pause and then come back to it. So some of the chapters in this are The Forgotten Story of Africa, Seven Ways Africa Shaped the Christian Mind, Defining Africa, One Faith and Two Africans, and How the Blood of African Martyrs Became the Seed of European Christianity. So this is the one by Thomas Oden.
00:24:48
Speaker
Okay, the next book is Rediscovering the Church Fathers, Who They Were and How They Shaped the Church by Michael A.G. Haken. I loved this book. This was a great read. This one goes over some of the most famous church fathers and early church fathers.
00:25:13
Speaker
So he's looking at their writings and the history about them. And at the very beginning of this book, he outlines why evangelical Christians really, really need to know church history, which you all know I'm very passionate about.
00:25:32
Speaker
So I think he did a great job with this. My uneducated opinion that he does not need on his work is that it's not only very wise and deep, but it's approachable for the average person. And that is hard to find. So he talks about
00:25:48
Speaker
Saint Ignatius, he talks about Patrick, he talks about Origen, Basil. I always, I always am afraid I'm mispronouncing some of these names. I look them up you guys, but the mark of a reader
00:26:04
Speaker
is that they mispronounce words because you've never heard them. You've only read them on the page. So I'm probably saying some of these wrong because I don't watch YouTube videos like ever. So especially about these topics. So I have to actually look up the pronunciations because I read so much that I often mispronounce words. So please forgive me. But all of these are in Michael Haken's book Rediscovering the Church Fathers. This would be a really great beginner book for understanding the early church.
00:26:32
Speaker
All right, now we are to some of the classics of church history.
Church History Resources
00:26:36
Speaker
The first that I want to mention, and I've already kind of hinted at, is the story of Christianity, parts one and two, by Justo Gonzalez. So Justo Gonzalez is one of the foremost, I think, or the foremost
00:26:53
Speaker
Hispanic Bible scholars who has ever written and all of his books are amazing. I love his work on the Holy Spirit. He has a book on Sabbath and Sunday. That's excellent. He has a book on Revelation. That's fantastic.
00:27:08
Speaker
All of his books are great, but Story of Christianity is by far my favorite. I've read through it twice and these are 300 page books. So part one and part two are each 300 pages. I love it because it's so well written. It's not dry, but it's very dense.
00:27:29
Speaker
So it could be me and the fact that I love this topic, but I usually do say that the person who really is interested in church history and wants to go deeper will actually enjoy this series. So The Story of Christianity, parts one and two. The next book that I recommend that usually to people who are starting out is Church History in Plain Language by Bruce Shelley. So this is just one edition. It does have some pictures.
00:27:59
Speaker
really great. If you don't want to do the two part Justo Gonzales method, then this is a really great resource too. And I love Bruce Shelley's work as well. I will say
00:28:14
Speaker
It isn't in as plain of language as you may expect. So if reading church history straight from like the Latin or the Greek is like reading the KJV, Bruce Shelley's church history in plain language is like reading maybe the NKJV.
00:28:35
Speaker
Maybe NASB. It's not like the message, if you know what I mean. So it is in plain language, but it's not in like surfer language. So it's still a little bit hard sometimes to process through what he's saying. All right, the next book I want to share with you is called The Church in the Middle Ages, Cathedrals, Crusades, and the Papacy in Exile. And this is by Steve Weidenkopf.
00:29:03
Speaker
I think I said that right. So this is part of a series by Ave Maria Press. It is a Catholic resource. It's actually part of the series called Reclaiming Catholic History. And I really felt like I didn't know a whole lot about medieval Christianity. So I took a couple months and I just read a bunch of books about it. And this was one of the books I read. I enjoyed this because I wanted to hear the Catholic perspective, but I did find that it's treatment of
00:29:32
Speaker
things like the Crusades and the Inquisition seemed a little bit like in denial about what happened. So I would be interested to see if there are any other treatments of those topics. But I haven't read the early church version or the other books in the series, but I did enjoy this one and it would be a neat way to get the Catholic perspective if you're interested in that.
00:29:56
Speaker
The next book I have is called Medieval Christianity, a New History by Kevin Madigan. This book has a fun stained glass picture on the front. This is probably next to Christianity in the Hellenistic world. This is probably the densest book.
00:30:15
Speaker
in this stack. It is pretty hard to weed through. It is very textbookish. I kind of had a little bit of PTSD seeing the sections and thinking back to syllabuses that I had.
00:30:31
Speaker
to read page 91 to 250. It kind of gave me flashbacks to that. So it's very helpful. It's just not the easiest read. So if you're really nerdy and you want something like this medieval Christianity, a new history would be fun for you. But the average person probably won't enjoy this one as much.
00:30:54
Speaker
All right, the last one I want to share with you is one of my treasured possessions. I found it at an antique store, which finding Christian history books at an antique store, that doesn't happen. So I was so, so pleased. Also, when I bought this and I opened it up to the dedication page, all it says is, to my wife. And I thought that was so sweet. So this book is called,
00:31:20
Speaker
A History of the Christian Church by Williston Walker, a one-time professor of ecclesiastical history in Yale University. So originally this was published in 1918. It was updated in 1946 and 1970. So I have the 1970 edition.
00:31:42
Speaker
This particular book works through multiple periods of church history. So he has it divided into seven periods. He divides them into the beginnings of Christianity to the Gnostic crisis, from the Gnostic crisis to Constantine, the Imperial State Church, the Middle Ages to the close of the investiture controversy, the later Middle Ages,
00:32:11
Speaker
the Reformation and Modern Christianity. So I read through I think the second section and then I used it as a reference for some different projects I was working on. I have enjoyed it, but again, I'm cross-referencing it with other resources to kind of check, you know,
00:32:35
Speaker
Is this consistent with what he's saying? Is it consistent? Has it been updated since we have, you know, new archaeological evidence and this was written in 1970, etc. But I find it a fun read. I love vintage books. I collect them. So it's kind of fun to sit down by the fire with candles and read this, you know, read it out of this beautiful burgundy vintage book. I don't know how hard this one would be to find though. So this one is definitely an older edition.
00:33:03
Speaker
Okay, I have thrown at you so many church history books. You might be thinking, well, great, Felicia. I don't have the budget for this. I don't even know where to begin because you gave me so many. Here's my hope. Okay.
00:33:18
Speaker
Some of you who are listening to this have already read Bruce Shelley's book, or you've already read what Justo Gonzalez has written, so you're looking for something else. And so if that's you, you may be ready for something like the medieval Christianity book by Kevin Madigan, or maybe you want to study the early church fathers, so you read Michael Haken's book on the church fathers, or maybe you're wondering about Africa, so you read Thomas Oden's book.
Reading Tips and Engagement
00:33:44
Speaker
My hope is that you can just pick and choose what interests you. I am a huge fan of interest-led learning. So you're much more likely to be engaged in what you're reading if you're following your interests. You're not just reading something because you have to. So what interests you in church history? What are you curious about? What do you want to know more about? So I wanted to know more about the Middle Ages. I felt like that was a gap in my understanding of church history. So that's why I read a bunch of books about it. And then when I was kind of bored with it, I moved on to a different section of church
00:34:14
Speaker
history. Maybe you want to know how the moral majority formed in the 1900s and the 1980s. What happened leading up to that, that that became such a movement in the United States. So you're probably going to want to look into Billy Graham and Francis Schaeffer and Jerry Falwell and all of what they were doing in the United States at that time.
00:34:38
Speaker
So whatever you're interested in, whatever your passion is, follow that passion and pick books according to that because you're much more likely to follow through on reading them. A couple other practical reading tips. I know I have a lot of busy college students who listen. I have
00:34:55
Speaker
young moms who listen. I have men who listen who are dads or who are pastors. And it's really hard to find time to read stuff like this. I'm often asked, how do you find time to read this kind of thing? Because I do homeschool my kids. I work 20 to 30 hours a week. And then we have goats and we make dinner and you know, stuff like that that you've got to do. So here's some tips. Don't
00:35:20
Speaker
only read when you have 30 minutes of uninterrupted time. I will take books with me in my purse and read them while I wait in line somewhere, read them in the car. I will sit down for five to 10 minutes, set a timer on my phone and read for 10 minutes. I will put a book next to the oven while I'm cooking dinner and I will read while I cook dinner. I get most of my reading done in short little increments. And then I do read at bedtime too.
00:35:46
Speaker
But I try to make a goal of reading 30 minutes a day. I will count audiobooks, but a lot of these books don't come on audio. So I am trying to read at least 30 minutes a day, and I'm doing that often in broken up increments. So if your goal is perfection or perfect circumstances, this applies to Bible study and also applies to church history reading, you're not going to have it happen. So reading has to be a priority to you. You're going to have to give something else up.
00:36:14
Speaker
to make reading a priority. And I'll probably do a whole episode about reading and the Christian mind in the future. But those are just some quick tips for getting that reading in. Be okay with short increments. Be okay with thinking about a paragraph or two. It's better than not doing it at all.
00:36:34
Speaker
I hope that you enjoy these recommendations. They will be up on the show notes in the latter half of November or search the name and the author on Christian book or thrift books and hopefully you can find a good deal on these. Next week we hope to have an episode
00:36:52
Speaker
from Verity Conference. So I'm excited if we're able to get that up next week with all of the time and all of the post-conference wildness of breaking it down and resetting everything. We hope to get you that episode next week.
00:37:08
Speaker
And again, I'm so grateful for my listeners. Thank you for leaving your reviews. They mean so much because they help other people find this podcast. And I also love hearing from you what you want to hear more about.
Listener Engagement and Feedback
00:37:22
Speaker
If there's a topic in Christian history or a topic in theology and Christian life that you want to hear more about, you can email me and my team at felicia at feliciamasonheimer.com.
00:37:35
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Verity Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, would you take the time to leave us a review? It helps so many other women around the world find out about Verity and about every woman a theologian as a ministry and a shop. We appreciate you and I hope you'll be back next week as we continue to go deeper into God's word and the heart of Jesus Christ.