Need book recommendation for evangelical friend

[Hecap22]

My boss at work is leaving in a few weeks. Everyone is getting her a gift. She’s a real nice person.

She is a devout evangelical who loves reading old Christian books. Sermons by pastors from the 1800s and such. She doesn’t read anything about the church prior to the Reformation. Not out of spite but because she feels it’s not relevant to her faith.

I’d like to get her a book on early church history or the church Fathers. I don’t want it to be an in-your-face Catholic apologetic but more a look at the first Christians and what they did and believed.

I am thinking Jimmy Aiken’s book might be good but wonder if it comes across as too much of a straight-on Catholic apologetic.

Anyway, I’d appreciate any suggestions you might have.

Thanks

 

[wanner47]

I think the “Fathers Know Best” by Jimmy Akin is a wonderful idea, and I don’t think it’s “too Catholic” at all.

 

[Lancer]

Two recommendations:

Parochial and Plain Sermons by [Blessed] John Henry Cardinal Newman

http://www.ignatius.com/Content/Site107/ProductImages/PPS-H.jpg

All eight volumes of Newman’s famous sermons are brought together in this edition that is beautifully printed and bound on Bible paper with a flexible leatherette cover and red ribbon. Newman’s sermons are as powerful, fresh and challenging today as when he first gave them.

ignatius.com/Products/PPS-H/parochial-and-plain-
sermons.aspx

AND
Cure D’Ars Today
St. John Vianney by Fr. George Rutler

http://www.ignatius.com/Content/Site107/ProductImages/CAT-P.jpg

“This is a very unusual, perhaps even a unique biography. Father Rutler does more than give the “facts” about the life of the Curé of Ars. With bold strokes, like a master Chinese calligrapher, he captures the spirit of the age in which he lived, unveils the sanctity of a humble parish priest, and gets to the heart of what it means to be a priest—not just then, but now and for all time. Along the way Father Rutler brilliantly shows that the Curé of Ars is a priest for all seasons.”
— Kenneth Baker, S.J. Editor, Homiletic and Pastoral Review

Fr. George Rutler, a graduate of Dartmouth and the Angelicum, is a parish priest and a university chaplain for the New York Archdiocese. His previous books include Beyond Modernity.

ignatius.com/Products/CAT-P/cure-dars-today.aspx

Pax Christi

 

[Contarini]

My boss at work is leaving in a few weeks. Everyone is getting her a gift. She’s a real nice person.

She is a devout evangelical who loves reading old Christian books. Sermons by pastors from the 1800s and such. She doesn’t read anything about the church prior to the Reformation. Not out of spite but because she feels it’s not relevant to her faith.

I’d like to get her a book on early church history or the church Fathers. I don’t want it to be an in-your-face Catholic apologetic but more a look at the first Christians and what they did and believed.

I am thinking Jimmy Aiken’s book might be good but wonder if it comes across as too much of a straight-on Catholic apologetic.

Anyway, I’d appreciate any suggestions you might have.

Thanks

Several suggestions:

The Spirit of Early Christian Thought by Robert Louis Wilken. This is a wonderful survey of early Christianity by a great scholar who converted to Catholicism from Lutheranism. It’s meditative in tone rather than apologetic–you get the Catholic understanding of the Fathers but not in an “in-your-face” way.

*Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants *by D. H. Williams. This one is actually by a Baptist, so it will contain ideas that you as a Catholic might not agree with, but perhaps fewer than you would think. Williams is at the forefront of the “evangelical ressourcement” movement–getting evangelicals to take tradition, especially the early Church, more seriously.

Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers by Christopher Hall (he has two other books out now, one on theology and one on worship) is an introduction to patristic exegesis. Mark Shea’s Senses of Scripture covers similar ground, I believe (actually I’ve read Shea and not Hall), but of course is actually by a Catholic apologist. Hall is an Anglican.

You might also consider buying her a book by one of the Church Fathers–Athanasius On the Incarnation or Augustine’s Confessions or a volume of the Apostolic Fathers would all be good places to start. Or one of the great spiritual classics of the later Catholic tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux, Julian of Norwich, Thomas a Kempis, Francis de Sales, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Thomas Merton are all writers whom many Protestants have found very helpful, just to name a few.

Edwin