We all have our favorite Christian books, as well as our favorite ones for undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, Urbana attendees, and so on. But which one is the best, the one book to which all others pale in comparison? Here on the Emerging Scholars Blog, we’re going to find out.
Next month, the best men’s and women’s NCAA basketball teams will battle it out in a single elimination tournament to determine the single best team in the land. While talking about basketball at Urbana, Tom and I thought, “What better way to choose the best Christian book of all time?”
Here’s how it’s going to work:
- The ESN Tournament of Christian Books will feature 64 great Christian books (no play-in games for us, thank you).
- We’ll bracket the books according to era (Classic, 20th Century, etc.) and possibly by genre, and seed them according a top-secret method.
- The books will “compete” against each other through polls. Your votes will determine which book moves on to the next round.. We’ll run the polling on the blog and our Facebook page.
- The tournament will kick off the week of March 17 and conclude by April 8, just like that other tournament.
- As the tournament field shrinks, we’ll run features about the final competing books.
But we need your help to select the books that we’ll include in the tournament. Leave your nominations in the comments below. Feel free to nominate as many books as you want.
Which books are eligible? Any “Christian book” may be nominated, including but not limited to:
- Works of theology
- Devotionals and prayer books
- Books of poetry
- Commentaries on Scripture
- Novels
- Biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs
- Christian nonfiction
For the sake of fairness, the Bible and books of the Bible will not be eligible to compete. Any questionable cases will be arbitrated by our selection committee (i.e. me and Tom).
If you need help thinking of nominations, check the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and Christianity Today‘s list of 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals
Leave your nominations in the comments or share them on Facebook. May the best book win!
The former Associate Director for the Emerging Scholars Network, Micheal lives in Cincinnati with his wife and three children and works as a web manager for a national storage and organization company. He writes about work, vocation, and finding meaning in what you do at No Small Actors.