"Squishy evangelicalism"

Kevin DeYoung has been thinking about "If We Believe All the Same Things, Why Do Our Churches Seem So Different?" and has come to some conclusions:

...[H]ere are ten things that distinguish between what I would call a vibrant, robust Bible-believing church and one that gets the statement of faith right but feels totally different.

1. The mission of the church has gotten sidetracked.  ....
2. The church has become over-accommodating. .... [B]ecause of this dominant instinct, they avoid hard doctrines, cut themselves off from history and tradition, and lean toward pragmatism.
3. The gospel is assumed. While the right theology may be affirmed in theory, it rarely gets articulated. No one believes the wrong things, but they don’t believe much of anything. ....
4. There is no careful doctrinal delineation. .... You will quickly notice a difference in message and methods between the church whose operating principle is “doctrine divides” and the one that believes that doctrine leads to doxology.
5. The ministry of the word is diminished.  ....
6. People are not called to repentance. ....
7. There is no example of carefully handling specific texts of Scripture. .... Churches may still espouse a high view of Scripture but without a diet of careful exposition they will not know how to study the Bible for themselves and will not be discerning when poor theology comes along.
8. There is no functioning ecclesiology. .... Careful shepherding, elder training, regenerate church membership, a functioning diaconate, purposeful congregational meetings–these are the things you may not know you’ve never had. But when you do, it’s a different kind of church.
9. There is an almost complete disregard for church discipline. .... All the best theology in the world won’t help your church or your denomination if you don’t guard against those who deny it. If we are to be faithful and eternally fruitful, we must warn against error, confront the spirit of the age, and discipline the impenitent.
10. The real problem is something other than sin and the real remedy is something other than a Savior.  .... We lose sight that the biggest problem (though not the only problem) confronting the churchgoer every Sunday is that he is a sinner in need of a Savior.

.... The evangelical church needs depth where it is shallow, thoughtfulness where it is pragmatic, and conviction where it has become compromised. A casual adherence to a formal set of basic doctrines does not guarantee real unity and does not ensure genuine spiritual strength. [more, in which he expands upon the ten points of difference]

If We Believe All the Same Things, Why Do Our Churches Seem So Different? – Kevin DeYoung

Hating the sin while loving the sinner

Anyone who has followed the debates online or off about gay marriage, or about the attitudes of Christians generally toward homosexuality, has encountered anger from those who deny that it is possible to hate a sin and not simultaneously hate the sinner. One who disapproves of behavior, it seems, must necessarily hate the person who indulges in it. No doubt many of those who feel that way have some basis for their view in past personal experience. But I would guess that they have had other experiences that would tend to contradict the impossibility of separating the person you care for from the act of which you disapprove. Every parent with a healthy attitude toward a child does it often. And each of us has had relatives, friends, and acquaintances — individuals for whom we sincerely care and who we wish well — who habitually do things of which we strongly disapprove. Hating the sin while loving the sinner is a normal part of almost everyone's life whether born of religious conviction or not. And that is true of the attitude of many of us toward our gay relatives, friends, and acquaintances, and even strangers, whether or not there are others in society who are unable to make that distinction.

"Gentle Jesus, meek and mild"?

Michael J. Kruger, who is a New Testament professor, has watched a film that reminded him that Jesus was rather controversial:

Not long ago a friend sent me the Jesus film entitled The Gospel of John. This is a movie that tells the story of Jesus through the lens of John’s gospel. I don’t typically watch Jesus movies, but he assured me this was worth my time. So, one afternoon I put in the DVD and sat down to watch. It was a well done film and, generally speaking, very faithful to the gospel of John. But, as I watched the movie, something struck me at a level of depth that I had never experienced before: Jesus was very unpopular.

Of course, this is a truth we all know well—so well, in fact, that we often forget it. But, it was abundantly clear in the film version of John’s gospel. We rarely sit down and read a gospel through in one sitting anymore. We just don’t take the time to do it. But in the film version, I got the gospel in one large dose. And I was blown away by the amount of arguing, debating, and polemical interactions that Jesus experienced. There was yelling, screaming, and shouting. Accusations and charges. Heated exchanges. And there was Jesus, right in the middle of all of it. .... [more]

Professor Kruger draws some conclusions about ministry in our time from our Lord's experience as recounted in John:

1. We need to adjust our expectations about how people will receive our message. ....
   
2. We need to prepare ourselves for ministry marked by conflict and hostility. ....
   
3. We need to remember that there is a proper place for debate and disagreement in our ministries. .... [more, in which he elaborates on each point]
   

Remembering the Unpopular Jesus | Canon Fodder

Psalm 34:8

I was reminded by a friend today of a wonderful choral setting of Psalm 34:8, one of my favorite verses. Vaughan Williams' composition for the verse was first performed at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

O taste and see how gracious the LORD is:
blessed is the man that trusteth in him.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, O Taste and See:

I also very much like the earlier setting by John Goss [1800-1880], which I know from this CD, Ave Verum: Favourite Parish Anthems. I haven't found a completely satisfactory recording of that one online. This terminates early but gives an almost complete performance: http://www.esoc-chorus.de/sound/tasteandsee.mp3

Another reading list

Justin Taylor provides another reading list for young people, this one for the early grades, and promises to expand the list later.

There are hundreds of thousands of books written for children. The challenge is discerning what is best for them to read, given so many options. I’m a sucker for good reading lists, so I’m grateful for the folks at Calvary Classical School—a classical Christian school in Hampton, VA—who have given me permission to reproduce this list below. ....

So far I’ve been able to provide links for the grades 1-3 lists. Lord willing, and time permitting, I will provide the other lists (up to 8th grade) in future posts. ....

At his site Taylor provides Amazon purchase links for each of the books listed. For each grade the school has a list of books read aloud in class or assigned, and lists suggested for outside reading at three levels - I presume levels of difficulty. These are the books "read in class or assigned for outside reading" for Second Grade:

Andersen, Hans C. The Emperor’s New Clothes
Brown, Marcia. Dick Whittington and His Cat
Burton, Virginia. The Little House
Burton, Virginia. Mike Mulligan and His Steamshovel
Cauley, Lorinda. The Ugly Duckling
Cleary, Beverly. The Mouse and the Motorcycle
Cleary, Beverly. Ribsy
Dalgliesh, Alice. The Bears on Hemlock Mountain
Lewis, C.S. The Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe
McCloskey, Robert. Time of Wonder
Steig, William. Doctor De Soto
Warner, Gertrude. The Box-Car Children (vol. 1)
Williams, Marjorie. The Velveteen Rabbit [more]

An update 5/15: 4th and 5th grades.

Update 5/22: The list for all grades.

A Christian Classical School Reading List: Grades 1-3 – Justin Taylor

Progress may mean turning back

Conservative blogger John Hawkins counts down his choices for "The Top 25 C.S. Lewis Quotes." I might have chosen some of the same ones but the competition would have been serious - there are so many others that are good. I hope some of those reading his blog will be sufficiently inspired by his choices to read more of Lewis.

Counting down, Hawkins' top six C.S. Lewis quotations:

6) Whatever men expect, they soon come to think they have a right to: the sense of disappointment can, with very little skill on (the devil's) part, be turned into a sense of injury.

5) If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

4) We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

3) If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

2) Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

1) Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

The Top 25 C.S. Lewis Quotes - John Hawkins - Townhall Conservative Columnists

Among the savages

James Taranto comments on the discoveries of a Stanford anthropologist who has ventured out among her fellow citizens and returned to explain their peculiar ways:

.... Tanya Luhrmann, a Stanford anthropologist, did some field work on an exotic tribe called "evangelical Christians." She explains their mysterious ways to the open-minded, curious readers of the New York Times.

"If you want to understand how evangelicals conceive of their political life, you need to understand how they think about God," she explains. "I saw that when people prayed, they imagined themselves in conversation with God. They do not, of course, think that God is imaginary. . . . They imagine God as wiser and kinder than any human they know."

Fascinating, isn't it? Apparently some of these people live right here in America! In her fieldwork, Luhrmann reports, "I met doctors, scientists and professors at the churches."

And they vote—but they vote differently from the way regular people—oops, make that "secular liberals"—vote: "When secular liberals vote, they think about the outcome of a political choice. . . . When evangelicals vote, they think more immediately about what kind of person they are trying to become—what humans could and should be, rather than who they are."

Uh-oh, that could spell trouble for liberal politicians. But don't worry, Luhrmann has figured it out: "If Democrats want to reach more evangelical voters, they should use a political language that evangelicals can hear." And don't worry: "The good news for secular liberals is that evangelicals are smarter and more varied than many liberals realize."

Taranto is having fun with an article that actually explains rather sympathetically how evangelical voters approach politics. But it is extraordinary how out of touch with so many of their fellow citizens a large proportion of secular liberals seem to be.

The Comical of Higher Education - WSJ.com

Galileo

Tim O'Neill, who describes himself as "Atheist, Medievalist, Sceptic and amateur Historian" answers "What is the most misunderstood historical event?" with "The Galileo Affair." The material in this article was already familiar because a colleague with whom I taught a 9th grade TAG class — a science teacher and, like this author, an atheist — had included it in lectures to that class. Although the false narrative is the generally accepted one, the story told here is apparently well known to students of the history of science. The myths addressed by "The Galileo Affair":

Most people understand the trial of Galileo Galilei as a key example of religious bigotry clashing with the advance of science and the textbook case of "Medieval" ignorance and superstition being superseded by reason and science. In fact, the whole rather complex affair was not the black-and-white "science vs religion" fable of popular imagination and the positions of both Galileo and of the various churchmen involved were varied and complex. The popular conceptions of the Galileo Affair are marked by a number of myths:

1. "Galileo proved the earth went around the sun and not the other way around."

Actually, he did not. ....

2. "The Church rejected science, condemned heliocentrism and was ignorant of the science behind Copernicus' theory."

This is also a myth. ....

3. "The Church condemned heliocentrism because it believed the Bible had to be interpreted literally."

The Catholic Church did not (and does not) teach that the Bible had to be interpreted literally. ....

4. "Galileo was imprisoned in chains, tortured and threatened with being burned at the stake."

In November 2009 the comedian and actor Stephen Fry joined the late Christopher Hitchens in a televised debate with two Catholics on the question of whether the Catholic Church was "a force for good in the world." Fry and Hitchens won the debate hands down, but at one point Fry referred passionately to "the fact that [Galileo] was tortured" by the Inquisition. In his book The End of Faith, Sam Harris seems to be trying to refer to Galileo when he talks of the Church "torturing scholars to the point of madness for merely speculating about the nature of the stars". Voltaire famously wrote of how Galileo "groaned away his days in the dungeons of the Inquisition" and the idea that Galileo only backed down because of his (understandable) fear of being burnt at the stake is a mainstay of the fables about the Galileo Affair. All these ideas are nonsense. ....

.... A careful examination of the evidence shows that the modern fable that is most people's understanding of the Affair bears little resemblance to historical fact. Fables make for nice, neat stories with cute morals at the end. But history is not neat and rarely fits into morality tales. True rationalists are interested in what actually happened and why, studied as objectively as possible, not cute stories. Many of my fellow atheists, especially the ones of the more outspoken variety, would do well to brush up their history when it comes to Galileo and to tread carefully when invoking this subject. [more, in which each of the points above are elaborated]

Tim O'Neill's answer to What is the most misunderstood historical event? - Quora

The Christian novelist

Several of the quotations among these "8 Quotes from Christian Authors about the Importance of Good Fiction" are from Flannery O’Connor's  Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose:

“People are always complaining that the modern novelist has no hope and that the picture he paints of the world is unbearable. The only answer to this is that people without hope do not write novels. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won’t survive the ordeal.”

“Where there is no belief in the soul there is very little drama. The Christian novelist is distinguished from his pagan colleagues by recognizing sin as sin. According to his heritage he sees it not as sickness or an accident of environment, but as a responsible choice of offense against God which involves his eternal future.”

And from an "interview" with Flannery O’Connor created by Marvin Olasky using quotations from the same book:

WORLD: What’s the difference between a Christian novelist and a naturalistic (or materialistic) one?

O’CONNOR: The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn’t mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater. ....

WORLD: Why do you call lots of religious novels “sorry”?

O’CONNOR: The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns . . . by beginning with Christian principles and finding the life that will illustrate them. . . . The result is another addition to that large body of pious trash for which we have so long been famous. ....

WORLD: Are you overly hard on some Christian writers? Can’t even poorly written religious novels with pious characters be edifying?

O’CONNOR: Poorly written novels —no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters —are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.

WORLD: But can’t God use them for good?

O’CONNOR: We have plenty of examples in this world of poor things being used for good purposes. God can make any indifferent thing, as well as evil itself, an instrument for good; but I submit that to do this is the business of God and not of any human being.

8 Quotes from Christian Authors about the Importance of Good Fiction | St. Peter's List, WORLDmag.com | Interview with Flannery O’Connor | Marvin Olasky

Prayer

PRAYER

Master, they say that when I seem

To be in speech with you,

Since you make no replies, it's all a dream

—One talker aping two.

They are half right, but not as they

Imagine; rather, I

Seek in myself the things I meant to say,

And lo! the wells are dry.

Then, seeing me empty, you forsake

The Listener's role, and through

My dead lips breathe and into utterance wake

The thoughts I never knew.

And thus you neither need reply

Nor can; thus, while we seem

Two talking, thou art One forever, and I

No dreamer, but Thy dream.

C.S. Lewis, Poems, 1964, pp. 122-3

All truth is God's truth

Via Justin Taylor, R.C. Sproul on the age of the universe:

Politics, the Bible, and public policy

As any of my acquaintances could tell you, I have pretty strong political opinions. I believe my political views are consistent with — and often based on — my Christian convictions. But I could be wrong. Peter Wehner, who is politically engaged, reminds us that a certain modesty is appropriate when claiming Biblical sanction for our politics:

.... Too often people on both the left and the right insist the New Testament and Hebrew Bible provide a governing blueprint. In fact, they say virtually nothing about what we would consider public policy. They simply do not offer detailed guidance on (to name just a handful of issues) trade; education; welfare, crime; health care; affirmative action, immigration; foreign aid; legal reform; climate change; and much else. And even on issues that many people believe the Bible does speak to, if sometimes indirectly – including poverty and wealth, abortion and same-sex marriage, capital punishment and euthanasia – nothing in the text speaks to the nature or extent of legislation or the kind of prudential steps that ought to be pursued.

One may believe we have a scriptural obligation to be good stewards of the earth, but that doesn’t necessarily determine where one will stand on cap-and-trade legislation. An individual can take to heart the admonition in Exodus not to “oppress a stranger” and still grapple with the issue of whether to grant a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. A person of faith can embrace the words of Deuteronomy – “Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land” – and be on different sides of the welfare debate. Nor does the Bible tell us whether the 1991 Gulf War or the 2003 Iraq war was the right or wrong decision.

The Christian ethicist Paul Ramsey put it this way: “Identification of Christian social ethics with specific partisan proposals that clearly are not the only ones that may be characterized as Christian and as morally acceptable comes close to the original New Testament meaning of heresy.” ....

The Moral Case for Conservatism « Commentary Magazine

The world beyond the world

Peter Kreeft on why Heaven matters:

What difference does Heaven make to earth, to now, to our lives?

The answer to the question is only the difference between hope and despair in the end, between two totally different visions of life; between “chance or the dance.”

At death we find out which vision is true: does it all go down the drain in the end, or are all the loose threads finally tied together into a gloriously perfect tapestry? Do the tangled paths through the forest of life lead to the golden castle or over the cliff and into the abyss? Is death a door or a hole?

To medieval Christendom, it was the world beyond the world that made all the difference in the world to this world. The Heaven beyond the sun made the earth “under the sun” something more than “vanity of vanities”. Earth was Heaven’s womb, Heaven’s nursery, Heaven’s dress rehearsal. Heaven was the meaning of the earth. ....

It is Heaven and Hell that put bite into the Christian vision of life on earth, just as playing for high stakes puts bite into a game or a war or a courtship. Hell is part of the vision too: the height of the mountain is appreciated from the depth of the valley, and for winning to be high drama, losing must be possible.

For salvation to be “good news”, there must be “bad news” to be saved from. If all of life’s roads lead to the same place, it makes no ultimate difference which road we choose. But if they lead to opposite places, to infinite bliss or infinite misery, unimaginable glory or unimaginable tragedy, if the spirit has roads as really and objectively different as the body’s roads and the mind’s roads, and if these roads lead to destinations as really and objectively different as two different cities or two different mathematical conclusions – why, then life is a life-or-death affair, a razor’s edge, and our choice of roads is infinitely important. .... [more]

What Difference Does Heaven Make? : The Integrated Catholic Life

"Known only to their neighbors"

Calvin Coolidge on his father:

My father had qualities that were greater than any I possess. He was a man of untiring industry and great tenacity of purpose... He always stuck to the truth. It always seemed possible for him to form an unerring judgment of men and things. He would be classed as decidedly a man of character. I have no doubt he is representative of a great mass of Americans who are known only to their neighbors; nevertheless, they are really great. It would be difficult to say that he had a happy life. He never seemed to be seeking happiness. He was a firm believer in hard work. Death visited the family often, but I have no doubt he took a satisfaction in accomplishment and always stood ready to meet any duty that came to him. He did not fear the end of life, but looked forward to it as a reunion with all he had loved and lost.

"Holy Mother State"

Paul Ryan recently gave a speech at Georgetown attempting to explain his moral justification for the federal budgets he has proposed. His appearance there was vigorously protested and his proposals condemned by some who seem to believe that the application of Christian morality to public policy can only result in the expansion of government programs. In a column last weekend William McGurn argues that those condemning Ryan refuse to concede "that conservative Republicans advancing market-oriented answers are as serious about their moral case as liberal Democrats are about theirs," and that those who disagree with them —"...those who believe otherwise—i.e., those who argue that you best help the poor by breaking down barriers to ownership and opportunity—are not simply mistaken. They are selfish and uncaring."

From the column:

Paul Ryan shocked the gentle souls at Georgetown University when he traveled up to their campus last Thursday and said: "We believe that Social Security legislation, now billed as a great victory for the poor and for the worker, is a great defeat for Christianity. It is an acceptance of the idea of force and compulsion." The Wisconsin Republican went on to lament that "we in our generation have more and more come to consider the state as bountiful Uncle Sam," and that citizens justify what they get from the state by saying, "We got it coming to us."

Sure sounds like Mr. Ryan was channeling Ayn Rand.

Except for one thing. The words are not Mr. Ryan's. They come from a 1945 column by Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker, in which she complained about how state intervention limits personal freedom and responsibility. Day's skepticism about government was reflected in her nickname for it: "Holy Mother State."

How far we have traveled since then. As the protests surrounding Mr. Ryan's appearance confirm, the Catholic left long ago jettisoned any worries about the size or scope of government (except for national defense). So the Sermon on the Mount now becomes a call for a single-payer system of universal health insurance. ....

Let's be clear. Dorothy Day would never have embraced Paul Ryan. Still, she had a sense that has been completely lost among religious liberals today: an appreciation for the high price we all pay, poor as well as rich, when we rely on government to be our neighbor's keeper. (more)

McGurn: Paul Ryan's Cross to Bear - WSJ.com

Victims of Communism Day

Some advocate that, just as we recognize the victims of fascism on Holocaust Memorial Day, the victims of Communism should also be remembered with a particular day of remembrance. Communist regimes killed an estimated 80 to 100 million, not as the result of wars, but killed by their own governments.

May Day would be a good choice for that observation. Communists appropriated what had once been an international labor day and made it the occasion for massive celebrations of Marxism-Leninism — the May Day events in Red Square, for instance, with Soviet leaders standing on Lenin's Tomb as weapons, troops, and thousands of others passed before them. They made the day so toxic that American unions essentially stopped observing the day as a labor day.

It is important that we remember the cost of that utopian ideology just as we remember the victims of the 20th century's other massive political murderers. May Day would be a good day for that. From the Amazon review of The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression:

.... Communism did kill, Courtois and his fellow historians demonstrate, with ruthless efficiency: 25 million in Russia during the Bolshevik and Stalinist eras, perhaps 65 million in China under the eyes of Mao Zedong, 2 million in Cambodia, millions more Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America--an astonishingly high toll of victims. This freely expressed penchant for homicide, Courtois maintains, was no accident, but an integral trait of a philosophy, and a practical politics, that promised to erase class distinctions by erasing classes and the living humans that populated them. Courtois and his contributors document Communism's crimes in numbing detail, moving from country to country, revolution to revolution. The figures they offer will likely provoke argument, if not among cliometricians then among the ideologically inclined. So, too, will Courtois's suggestion that those who hold Lenin, Trotsky, and Ho Chi Minh in anything other than contempt are dupes, witting or not, of a murderous school of thought....

Juvenile suspense

I previously noted this review at Christianity Today of Andrew Klavan's Homelanders books:

I shudder to think of all the books occasioned by the 10th anniversary of 9/11. I won't read most of them, but I did make time for The Final Hour, the concluding installment in Andrew Klavan's four-book Homelanders series, in which Islamic terrorists seek to wreak havoc. The teenage hero, Charlie West, is a winsome Christian and a pretty tough customer. In publishing jargon, this is Young Adult fiction (in the subdivision known as "boy books"), but the unadulterated intelligence of a superb suspense novelist is very much in evidence throughout.

I thoroughly enjoyed these books as they were published and they definitely would have hooked me when I was in the target audience. They are now available combining the four books in a single volume paperback and as a Kindle edition.

Wilson's Bookmarks | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction

"But like a child at home"

The hymn site, Conjubilant with Song, notes that:

...[W]e're back again to Good Shepherd Sunday, celebrated in many churches on the Fourth Sunday of Easter. If it was observed in your church, you undoubtedly heard Psalm 23, perhaps in more than one format or setting. It's certainly the most paraphrased psalm I've presented here, and we have not run out of them yet! ....

In our worship yesterday the pastor chose my favorite paraphrase of the psalm, Isaac Watts' "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need."

My shepherd will supply my need:
Jehovah is His name;
In pastures fresh He makes me feed,
Beside the living stream.
He brings my wandering spirit back
When I forsake His ways,
He leads me, for His mercy’s sake,
In paths of truth and grace.

When I walk through the shades of death
Thy presence is my stay;
One word of Thy supporting breath
Drives all my fears away.
Thy hand, in sight of all my foes,
Doth still my table spread;
My cup with blessings overflows,
Thine oil anoints my head.

The sure provisions of my God
Attend me all my days;
O may Thy house be my abode,
And all my work be praise.
There would I find a settled rest,
While others go and come;
No more a stranger, nor a guest,
But like a child at home.

We sang the hymn to this tune, here performed by the Choir of Washington National Cathedral


Conjubilant with Song: I Drink From Their Plenty, My Shepherd Will Supply My Need

The 50 best books for children?

Yesterday I had a conversation before church with a grandparent about a very young grandson who has become an enthusiastic reader. A love of reading was one of the best gifts my parents gave me and, I'm convinced, is one of the best gifts any parent can give any child and so I am somewhat of an enthusiast on the topic. Some doubt was expressed about the quality of the books the grandchild was reading and so the subject turned to where good books could be found. I've posted before linking to lists of books for various age levels but those links seem to no longer be good. This morning I discovered a couple of other sites with what seemed to me pretty good recommendations.

The first list was compiled in answer to a British grandparent: "My granddaughter is only a few months old, but I would appreciate both guidance in buying books for children and a possible hit list of 50 books to own before you’re five.” In response the Telegraph columnist, noting that the list would have been somewhat different for a boy, provides her recommendations for the "top 50 books for children":

.... The list is divided into three broad sweeps: illustrated stories to read to a toddler – though many of these are likely to continue to be favourites well into primary school; novels for, broadly, eight- to 12-year-olds – or to read to a slightly younger child; and reference books and collections. .... [more]

That list can be found here: "Ask Lorna: top 50 books for children."

The second site — "The Art of Manliness" —  offers the "50 Best Books for Boys and Young Men." The compiler had a somewhat older age group in mind than the Telegraph compilation. He is particularly concerned to persuade boys to read:

.... For several decades now, boys have scored lower on reading assessment tests than girls. Boys also take longer to learn to read than girls, are less likely to actually read and to value reading, and are more likely to label themselves as “non-readers” (up to 50% of high school age boys consider themselves as such). Non-reading boys do poorer academically and end up as non-reading men....

...[W]e had boys about the ages of 9-15 in mind when we made this list, I’ve always considered the distinction between adult and young adult literature to be an unfortunate and artificial one. Putting together this list I remembered just how good these books are, and I can’t wait to read them again as a man. Whether you’re 12 or 52, grab one of these books and a bag of cookies and head out to the treehouse.

The site provides five pages with descriptions of, and order links to Amazon for, the "50 Best Books for Boys and Young Men".

Ask Lorna: top 50 books for children - Telegraph, 50 Best Books for Boys and Young Men | The Art of Manliness

A bottle of port

Via Elizabeth Scalia:

C.S. Lewis. Nails it.