Reading

“There never yet have been, nor are there now, too many good books.”
— Martin Luther

Book Club

Meetings are scheduled on the church calendar. See below to participate in choosing a better time for you.

An email list helps us coordinate. To get involved, send a blank email to cpsl-bookclub+subscribe@googlegroups.com,
then confirm with a reply.

Our current book is The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. We still have four copies at church. If there is interest in discussing it, we need to coordinate a way to meet up for the discussion.

Some Possible Books for the Future

Have a suggestion for this list? Come to the next meeting and share it!

Literature (fiction)

These tend to be “classics,” meaning that they have stood the test of time.

The Divine Comedy by Dante Aleghieri: The Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise
The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (pen name of Mary Ann Evans)
Phineas Finn and The Warden by Anthony Trollope
A novel by Jane Austen. Our church library now includes a collection of these that may be browsed.
A Peter Wimsey mystery by Dorothy Sayers. Check our church library for a collection that may be browsed.
One or more Father Brown mysteries by G.K. Chesterton. An omnibus volume is in our church library.
The Chronicles of Narnia series of 7 short children’s adventure books by C.S. Lewis, depicting ageless themes of the Christian faith in the form of a world parallel to Earth’s reality as created order. Each book may be read by an adult in 1-3 days.
The Ransom Trilogy (or Space Trilogy) of C.S. Lewis, including three quite different but related novels in the early sci-fi genre set in a speculative created cosmology. They involve serious questions of theological reality encouraging thought and discussion.
The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. You don’t really know the story if you’ve only seen the films. Mythological literature that stimulates the sanctified imagination to better grasp the “true myth” of our salvation.

Issues, Theology, Research, & Scholarship (non-fiction)

More of these may be “contemporary,” meaning that they address situations when they were written.

Dying to Live, by Harold Senkbeil - books available at church
Love, Marriage, and Family: Learning from the Early Christians by Erkki Koskenniemi (2026)
Taking Back Truth: A Biblical Response to Cultural Lies by Douglas Groothius (2026) Dr. Groothius also wrote the much larger book Christian Apologetics that was one of the valuable resources in Pastor Jacobsen’s ILT course on that topic.
The Kingdom of Cain and The Truth and Beauty‍ ‍by Andrew Klavan
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton (a “classic” available in various forms, including Kindle)

Past books

On the Freedom of a Christian (1520) by Martin Luther

Christ Lutheran Church Library

Our library contains a curated and growing collection with various kinds of media, literature, and more.

The library is open to our members, who can check out and return books themselves using the process outlined on the plastic index card box. Students at Christ Lutheran School can also use the library while at school. It is preferred that they return the books to the shelves before the end of the day, but in special circumstances may check them out for multiple days.

There are currently two shelves containing our collection, found in different locations. One is in the church nursery, where members attending services can conveniently browse, select, and return library contents. The other is in the fellowship hall, which is more accessible to students, since they regularly use that building for lunch and some other activities.

The books that belong in the nursery shelf are marked with a blue dot sticker. Those that belong in the Fellowship Hall are marked with a red one.

To see the current catalog of our collection, open the shared spreadsheets for each shelf, linked here. There are multiple tabs in each spreadsheet, sorted in different ways.

New and Upcoming Library Additions

Digestible Martin Luther Series

A small publisher in Minneapolis called Lutheran Press has been publishing a series of paperback editions that simplify or provide selections from Martin Luther’s own works for popular reading. A number of these are being added to our church library and are available for discussion in our book club. (Digital versions are also provided for free on the Lutheran Press website.) The images here show where in Luther’s Works (both German and English editions) these are found. The subject matter is always relevant for our time.