In summer 2021 I prepared a talk for the young adults in my church on resources that have helped me make sense of our pagan culture. I recently updated that for the Spring 2022 issue of CBMW’s journal Eikon:
Andrew David Naselli. “Ten Resources That Have Helped Me Make Sense of Our Current Culture and How Christians Are Responding to It.” Eikon: A Journal for Biblical Anthropology 4.1 (2022): 116–41.
These are the ten resources I commend and annotate (the first five are by non-Christians):
1. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin, 2018).
2. Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
3. Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Identity, Morality (New York: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019).
4. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2020).
5. Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, ed. Margaret M. Treadwell and Edward W. Beal, 2nd ed. (New York: Church, 2017).
6. Neil Shenvi on Critical Theory and Social Justice
7. Joe Rigney on Untethered Empathy
8. Carl R. Trueman on the Sexual Revolution:
Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020).
Carl R. Trueman, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022).
9. Kevin DeYoung, “Why Reformed Evangelicalism Has Splintered: Four Approaches to Race, Politics, and Gender,” The Gospel Coalition, 9 March 2021.
10. Jonathan Leeman on Authority and Deconstruction:
Jonathan Leeman, Don’t Fire Your Church Members: The Case for Congregationalism (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2016), 131–52.
Jonathan Leeman, “The Blessing of (Good) Authority: Lessons from a King’s Final Words (2 Sam. 23:3–4),” The Gospel Coalition, 27 September 2020.
Jonathan Leeman, “Defending Sound Doctrine against the Deconstruction of American Evangelicalism,” 9Marks Journal (2021): 7–33.
Jonathan Leeman, “An Ecclesiological Take on ‘The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill,’” 9Marks, 14 March 2022.
