How I came to Christ, Part Two

As I said previously, I was not actively searching for God or any kind of spiritual awakening. I set out to entertain myself by catching up on many of the books I missed in school.

Professionally I have always had to read a lot — mostly research papers and policy books – and write a lot — especially analyses of research, op-eds, testimony, and speeches. Evenings I would turn to fiction to clear out the brain. I’ve read most of what Stephen King wrote, and Scott Turow, John Grisham, David Baldacci and others. In the past I’ve gone on mystery jags (Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler) and science fiction (Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury) and social commentary (Doris Lessing,  Franz Kafka, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Wolf.) More recently I’ve become a fan of Vince Flynn and Dean Koontz and have read all the Harry Potter books, in part to be in better touch with my grandson.

—-

I really enjoyed Harry Potter. They were great escapist fantasies. When I finished them I was looking around for something similar and came across C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. I didn’t know much about Lewis. I had seen Shadow Lands and read A Grief Observed when a close friend died. I had never read The Witch, the Lion, and the Wardrobe when I was a kid. My family tilted more towards The Wind in the Willows at that age.

I had no idea that Lewis was one of the most prominent Christian thinkers of the Twentieth Century, so it came as a surprise to me that the Narnia stories were such compelling metaphors for the Christian belief. Especially striking was the last book, The Last Battle, which is a direct description of the Second Coming and the End of Times.

—-

Next I picked up Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s so Great About Christianity? Not all of my leisure reading has been fiction. I often dip into books on politics and economic such as Tipping Point, Freakonomics, The World is Flat, and books by contemporary political thinkers like Newt Gingrich and Laura Ingraham. One of these was D’Souza’s What’s so Great About America? which I thought was a wonderful affirmation of American ideals and principles.  I figured What’s so Great About Christianity? would be a similar defense of the founding ideas of Western Civilization.

It was that and a whole lot more. It is not primarily a political book but a bold defense of Christianity and rebuttal of atheism – on their own terms.  D’Souza did not shy away from spiritualism in this book, but he also points out that by Darwin’s own standard – survival of the fittest – Christians are more likely to survive than atheists are.

—–

The next book I read was one that has been sitting on my shelf for decades and I had never gotten around to reading – Boswell’s Life of Johnson. This is an intensely personal biography of Samuel Johnson, one of the preeminent English intellectuals of the Eighteenth Century, written by James Boswell who was a good friend and acolyte of Johnson’s. Among other things, Johnson single handedly wrote the definitive dictionary of the English language, one that remained in use for perhaps a century or so. I was eager to read it for the descriptions of London when it was rapidly becoming the commercial and intellectual capitol of the world. What surprised me was, again, its devotion to Christianity. It turns out that both Johnson and Boswell were devout Christians. The book includes a large number of prayers Johnson composed, and many of the other intellectuals Johnson interacted with were men of the cloth. In fact, outside of government it was the clergy that were the scholars and teachers of the era.

——

After that it was time for something lighter, so I turned to Dean Koontz. Koontz has always written about the struggle between good and evil, but I was surprised that he is becoming more explicitly Christian, especially with his Odd Thomas series, which includes a great deal of what can only be described as divine intervention in human affairs. In one of the series, Brother Odd, the protagonist joins a monastery as a lay brother.

Next week, the education of Greg continues with Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking People, The Shack, Girls Like Us, Left Behind, and Dinesh’s D’Souza’s Life After Death.