Reading List

Rather than bury you with a mountain of required reading, here's the best of the best: the seven books I consider most influential to this blog.
  • When God is Gone, Everything is Holy by Chet Raymo: A self-professed Catholic agnostic/religious naturalist, Raymo draws on poetry, art, and his own long career as a theoretical physicist to make the case that a worldview based on scientific understanding need not reject the religious experience.
  • Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter: A longstanding favorite.  Hofstadter unravels the deep ties between mathematics, music, art, and consciousness in a clever and lighthearted metaphysical treatise.
  • The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell: A rapturous survey of world myths of all ages and times, Campbell draws connections between a diversity of cultural expressions to reveal the underlying dynamics of human experience.  Other recommended titles by this legend: Myths to Live By, the four-volume The Masks of God: Primitive, Oriental, Occidental, and Creative Mythology, and his interview series with Bill Moyers.
  • The Bible: A Biography by Karen Armstrong: The Bible has taken many forms as it has developed across the millenia, and our relationship to it has evolved accordingly.  Armstrong, a former nun who has recently won the TED prize, brings balance to her assessment, criticizing the ways in which the book has been misconstrued while exploring centuries of mystical traditions and the cultural contexts in which the texts were formed.
  • The Fundamentalist Mind: How Polarized Thinking Imperils Us All by Dr. Stephen Larsen: A protege of Joseph Campbell, Larsen discusses the emerging neuroscience that is beginning to understand the mental patterns behind fundamentalist thinking, then proceeds to explore how it exists in various forms and creeds, including Christian, Muslim, secular, and New Age fundamentalisms, and admonishes that it is not one single brain state, but the ability to move among all of them, that characterizes a healthy human mind.
  • The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World by Paul Davies
  • Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think edited by Greg Wilson