Influential Books in Academia

Came across two cool links while browsing  openculture aobut influential books in academia. The first is called "the Open Syllabus Project", by a group that I think is from Columbia University, the Open Syllabus Project took over 1 million syllabi and figured out what were the most commonly studied books in higher educational institutions and made a pretty cool data chart to see it on.

The other link is an article from the Guardian that talks about a UK poll of publishers, librarians and academics about what were the most influential academic books. The number one book was Charles Darwin's "the Origin of Species" and the list of the top 20 in alphabetical order are below:



A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Orientalism by Edward Said
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer
The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson
The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein
The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Republic by Plato
The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
Ways of Seeing by John Berger

MLK Day- Bernie, West, Turner and Killer Mike

This is a pretty relevant weekly talk because of the recent MLK day and the rise of Bernie in the polls. If you do not really know much about what Bernie is running for then check out a video series he does with the rapper killer mike or some interviews he has with vox. Those are good ways to get to know what Bernie Sanders is running for. I mention those, because Sander's proposed policies are not the central theme of this but rather implied and if you don't know what he is calling for then you might not know how he lines up with king.

All in all, just a great panel of speakers and it made me want to get Cornel West's new book "the Radical King", a collection of some of  Martin Luther King's more liberal teachings.

Pope Francis' Encyclical - "on Care for our Common Home"

Augustine Warning of Foolishness

Augustine warning Christians about talking nonsense on topics they don't understand and deterring people from wanting to come talk to them with their questions about "resurrection, eternal life, etc."   This is from his work on the literal meaning of Genesis, which can be read on Google books.

“Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn (…) If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?"

Read The Fathers

Here is a great find on the inter webs, http://readthefathers.org, a blog that has put together a reading plan of the church fathers. It is a 7-year plan through the patristics while reading 7 pages a day at most, it started with Clement of Rome and over three years has gotten to Jerome.

I signed up for the daily email on the blog and am really enjoying getting an email from them everyday with a link to the reading for that day. They also do a few things other than the daily reading, like blogs on different figures in the church.

Anyways, check it out, its a really great resource.

“Faith” from Back to Virtue by Peter Kreeft (pg.72-73)

"Faith is first. But what is it? It is not mere belief, or mere trust, though it includes both. Belief is an intellectual matter (I believe the sun will shine tomorrow; I believe I am in good health; I believe the textbooks). Trust is an emotional matter (I trust my psychiatrist, or my surgeon, or my architect). Faith is more. It flows from the heart, the center of the person, the prefunctional root out of which both the intellectual and the emotional branches grow. Faith is the yea-saying of the I, the commitment of the person. 

The object of faith is God, not ideas about God. It is essential to know things about God, but it is more essential to know God. Saint Thomas Aquinas, that most rational (not the same as rationalistic) of theologians, insists that ‘the primary object of the act of faith is not a proposition but a reality’, God himself…. The creedal truths about him are a description of faith, a defining, a statement of structure. The creeds are like accounting books, God is like the actual money. 

Though the root of faith is not intellectual, its fruit is. ‘Faith seeing understanding’, fides quarens intellectum - this was the operative slogan for a thousand years of Christian philosophy. ‘Unless you believe, you will not understand’ - faith first. But ‘in they light we see light’ - understanding follows. How accurately the saints knew God; how mistaken all the unbelieving geniuses were!

Faith is more active than reason. Faith runs ahead of reason. Reason reports, like a camera. Faith takes a stand, like an army. Faith is saying Yes to God’s marriage proposal. Faith is extremely simple. Saying anything ore would probably confuse it. Most of what is written about faith is needlessly complex. The word yes is the simplest word there is. "

Timothy George on Karl Barth as a "church theologian"

I enjoyed this article by Timothy George on Karl Barth. The whole article is good and worth reading, I especially enjoyed the beginning note about Harvey Cox smuggling Barth's Dogmatics into the Soviet Union. Below is an excerpt from the article about Barth as a "church theologian": 

"Karl Barth was a churchly theologian. What does this mean? In the first place, it refers to the fact that, unlike the majority of professional theologians, both in his day and in ours, Barth did not possess an earned doctorate. This was obviously not from any lack of scholarly ability on his part, but rather from his prior decision to pursue pastoral ministry rather than an academic career. For twelve years Barth served as a pastor, first as a pastoral assistant at a German-speaking congregation in Geneva and then as pastor of the Swiss Reformed Church in Safenwil, a small industrial town in the Aargau. Barth’s distinctive theology emerged out of his pastoral struggles. What does the preacher say to the waiting congregation every Sunday morning? How dare he say anything at all? This tension between the preacher’s duty to speak for God, on behalf of God, and the enormous presumption, indeed the impossibility, of doing so is at the very root of Barth’s theological discovery. He once put it like this: “We ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give God the glory.”
Barth’s theological training in the great liberal tradition of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Harnack, and Hermann had not prepared him to deal with this dilemma, nor had his immersion in the Swiss version of the social gospel movement, an involvement which earned him the title “red pastor” for a while. Barth was haunted by the question King Zedekiah posed to Jeremiah long ago: “Is there any word from the Lord?” (Jer. 37:17). This question, which is every preacher’s question, propelled Barth back to the Holy Scriptures, where he discovered a new orientation for preaching and a new basis for theology.