I've always been a lover of books, though I read dreadfully slowly. But books have always been a source of grace for me, a place where my mind and my heart are expanded. So I thought I would share with all of you a few of the books that have most shaped me.

This is based on an exercise first initiated by Tyler Cowen on his blog here. I'm not a regular reader of Cowen's blog, but I do regularly read the blogs of journalist Rod Dreher and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, both of whom have made their own lists based off of Cowen's. As such, I've adopted Cowen's rules for the exercise: It must be a "gut list," meaning that I can't take too long to think about it but just write whatever comes out. As such, it's also not in any particular order. And it's limited to ten, which means that it's not comprehensive. I'm also adding two additional rules for myself: It cannot include the Bible, which stands in a category all its own for the influence it has had on me, and it cannot include entire series of works since this would undoubtedly allow me to backdoor in well more than ten.

So, with no further delay, here's my list...

The Gospel and the Catholic Church by Michael Ramsey

Michael Ramsey was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1961 to 1974 and wrote a number of books that are dear to me, but I still think this is his best, and I'm pleased to see that it's finally in print again. This book comes from an earlier era, when Ramsey was a young priest in the 1930s. Reading this book made me proud to be an Anglican. Ramsey argues persuasively that the Catholic and Evangelical parties within the Anglican Church desperately need each other because each offers an incomplete witness on their own. A truly Catholic Church is an Evangelical Church and vice versa. Ironically, it was Ramsey, an Anglo-Catholic, who lead me to an embrace of the Evangelical position within the Church. It's because of him that I can lay claim to be an Evangelical Catholic.

Stranger Music by Leonard Cohen

I read this when I was fourteen. It blew my mind. Cohen is a poetic genious of the first order, and experiencing his poetry and lyrics helped me to have a language for my own experience of the mystical and the mysterious.

Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice

Long before the current teen vampire craze, I was a loyal and devoted fan of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. I started with Memnoch, which was the fifth book in the series, because of an interview I read with Anne Rice in Rolling Stone and because the book had an appealing cover. At the time, I didn't read much. Reading was always slow for me and I couldn't keep up with reading for school. I relied on good note taking skills and being attentive in class to get me by. But so many of the books we had to read were so dreadful and seemed not to matter. Memnoch was different. It was about life and death, heaven and hell, the hope of other dimensions of reality and the frightening possibility of nothingness. I was fifteen. It rocked my world. After reading it, I was hooked. I read the rest of the vampire books and then anything else by Rice I could find. She opened up for me the possibilities of what fiction could do and be, and more specifically she showed me the beauty and the versatility of the novel as a medium. At the time I was first reading her I was finding my way away from the Church, and so Rice's Atheist vision appealed. But I'm pleased to note that Rice herself came back to faith in the last decade and has written about her experience of walking through the darkness to find again the light of faith.

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis

Most of Lewis' writings have influenced me in one way or another, but this was earth shattering. In a short narrative, Lewis managed to overthrow my doubts about life after death and helped me to reconcile the existence of hell with the seemingly contradictory notion of a loving God. In restrospect, I don't really think it's his best work, but it's exactly what I needed to read at the time.

Real Sex by Lauren WInner

Continuing with the theme of shedding new light on traditional Christian teaching, this book helped me to come to grips with the Church's understanding of the place of sex exclusively within the covenant of marriage. Winner approaches the topic with humility and compassion, out of a modern experience that is genuinely honest. She doesn't preach. She simply shares what she's learned in the hopes that it will help others. Reading what she said encouraged me to go back to the scriptures and ask some hard questions, which ultimately helped me to understand how the Church has understood the sacredness of sexuality throughout the centuries. Plus it's just fun to be sitting out in public in a coffee shop with a book called "Real Sex" in your hands, especially if you're wearing a collar.

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

This is probably the most recent read on my list, but already I see how it's changing how I think about food. Pollan does a magnificent job both of telling the story of how food has become so bad in our society and of how we can get out from under the weight of the food industry's thumb. Pollan made me re-think everything about how I shop for food, how I cook, and what I put into the mouths of my family.

Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton

This is Chesterton's most famous work, but it's far from his best. It's not even my favorite. But reading this book in seminary changed me in one very important way: It showed me that the orthodox Christian faith is a romance. I don't mean this in the modern sense in which we equate romance with sappy love stories and terrible movies. I mean in the classical sense, in which King Arthur and the Odyessey and all the great adventure stories are ultimately romantic, portraying the hero's search for truth and his inevitable discovery of truths beyond his wildest dreams. I learned from reading Chesterton to open myself to the possibility that rather than restricting my heart and my mind, perhaps what Christian doctrine does is to open my heart and my mind to the kind of magical and poetic experience of the world that I'd never have if I remained stuck in a prison of my own self-limited rationalism.

Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community by Wendell Berry

No one can more succinctly and more effectively make the case for tradition, history, and an embrace of the local and particular over the globalized and homogenized than Wendell Berry. Just reading the first eight pages of this book was consciousness expanding for me. And for those of you keeping count, this is the second book on my list with "sex" in the title.

Gender by Frederica Mathewes-Green

I was a gender studies minor in college. I've read a ton of books on gender and feminism. This one totally turned me upside down. I love it.

The Complete Works of Emily Dickinson

Poetry spoke to me long before anything else did. I memorized Dickinson's poem "I Felt a Funeral in My Brain" when I was twelve. In a weird way, I think she taught me how to rap.

What are the books that have most influenced or shaped you?