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In a time of contested truths, weakening institutions, and totalizing narratives that invoke a mood of coercion and cooptation, the need to learn from those in other places and times—whose consciences were attuned to the fragility of a humane future, and who risked action on that conscience—is as timely as it is timeless.
We’ve curated a short list of books that have guided our team in preparing this issue—works that illuminate the spiritual attentiveness, political realism, moral imagination, and, crucially, friendships needed to live as a remnant: those who labour softly yet steadfastly to honour God’s name, resist what corrupts, and build what is true, good, and beautiful. You may not agree with everything in every one of these books—nor do they all agree with each other. But each seeks to articulate in its own way the struggle and the hope of living faithfully under pressure.
This is a library for those seeking to resist capture by today’s deconstructive forces while cultivating a Christian humanism that is cross-class, cross-culture, cross-sector, and cross-cognitive—in solidarity for the common good. May it become a compass as you discern your own responsibility on the road ahead.
—The editors
The Prophets
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Isaiah: Spirit of Courage, Gifts of Tears
Daniel Berrigan, SJ
Letters and Papers from Prison
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A Testament of Hope
Martin Luther King Jr.
Jesus and the Disinherited
Howard Thurman
The Long Loneliness
Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion
Robert Coles
Who Are My People?
Emmanuel Katongole
The Power of the Powerless
Václav Havel
The Captive Mind
Czesław Miłosz
The Gulag Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Selected Writings of Jan Patočka: Care for the Soul
Jan Patočka
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt
The True Believer
Eric Hoffer
1984
George Orwell
The Souls of Black Folk
W.E.B. Du Bois
A Black Theology of Liberation
James Cone
Black Skin, White Masks
Frantz Fanon
Decolonising the Mind
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63
Taylor Branch
Living for Change: An Autobiography
Grace Lee Boggs
July’s People
Nadine Gordimer
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
The Fire Next Time
James Baldwin
The Abolition of Man
C.S. Lewis
The Strangest Way
Fr. Robert Barron
Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy
Luke Bretherton
Working with Words: On Learning to Speak Christian
Stanley Hauerwas
Fully Alive
Elizabeth Oldfield
The Genesis of Gender
Abigail Favale
Love, Power, and Justice
Paul Tillich
The Risk of Education
Luigi Giussani
Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement
Steven Bouma-Prediger, Brian J. Walsh
The Abundant Community
Peter Block, John McKnight
Sharing the Crust: A Communion of Saints in a Baltimore Neighborhood
Mark Gornik
Training for Transformation: Handbooks for Community Workers
Anne Hope, Sally Timmel
The Unsettling of America
Wendell Berry
The Way of Ignorance
Wendell Berry
Turtle Island
Gary Snyder
Tools for Conviviality
Ivan Illich
No Logo
Naomi Klein
The End of Nature
Bill McKibben
Scripture, Culture, Agriculture
Ellen Davis
Refounding the Church: Dissent for Leadership
Gerald A. Arbuckle
Ecclesiogenesis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church
Leonardo Boff
A Theology of Liberation
Gustavo Gutiérrez
Torture and Eucharist
William Cavanaugh
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Frederick Douglass
Mother Courage and Her Children
Bertolt Brecht
Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie
The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain
Ralph McInerny
The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
Anna Akhmatova
The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam
Osip Mandelstam
Mother Courage and Her Children
Bertolt Brecht
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
David Foster Wallace
God Is
David Adams Richards
Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire
Peter Brown
A People’s History of Christianity
Diana Butler Bass
Political Trauma and Healing: Biblical Ethics for a Postcolonial World
Mark Brett
The First Dissident: The Book of Job in Today’s Politics
Bill Safire
