100 Books Like Re-Enchanting the Earth

This is a book that rocked me and a whole generation back in the 1960s and is now considered a classic in radical theology.

John Robinson was a radical Anglican bishop who managed to pack an explosive theological punch into a feisty and fairly short book, its brevity being one of its merits. He threw theism into doubt by drawing upon the revolutionary theologies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (religionless Christianity), Rudolf Bultmann (demythologizing Christianity), and Paul Tillich (God is the ground of being, not the Supreme Being).

The book became a sensation, a best seller, and set the stage for a radical post-theistic theology today and helped shape my work.

Paul Tillich is my choice for the great theologian of the twentieth century (not Karl Barth, orthodoxy’s hero).

For Tillich, religion is not a matter of creeds but a matter of “ultimate concern,” of what is unconditionally important; “God” is not the Supreme Being, but the “ground of being;” religion is not particular cultural practice but the depth structure of the entire culture; dig deeply enough into art or science or anything, and you will hit theological ground.

His Dynamics of Faith and The Courage to Be are his “greatest hits,” but I love Theology of Culture because it lays all this out with such lucidity. Atheism about the Supreme Being is not the end of theology but the beginning of radical theology.

This book contains a magisterial rendering of the mystical poet Angelus Silesius’s verse, “The Rose Is Without Why” as part of a critical analysis of the emergence of the modern idea of “reason.”

This book has never left me since I first encountered it in my doctoral dissertation on Heidegger back in the 1960s. It landed like a bombshell on a young Catholic like me, opening a poetic and mystical sense of life free from the creeds and authoritarianism of religion as well as from the doctrinaire dismissiveness of Enlightenment rationalism.

Written at the end of his career, it encapsulates everything Heidegger was getting at. We must never forget the horrible stain of Heidegger’s National Socialism, which I have analyzed (Demythologizing Heidegger), but there is more to Heidegger than that, and you can find it here.

The evidence is staring us in the face that religion is shaming itself out of existence and God along with it.

Robin Meyers is one of those people who can save, if not religion, which may have done itself irreparable damage, but God and Jesus and faith. Meyers is a United Church of Christ pastor, a university professor, and a peace activist, so he brings a special combination of the pastor’s touch for telling stories to make a point and for changing lives and the professor’s depth of learning.

I could just as easily have recommended his companion book Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus but I chose this book because it is more recent. His question is, is religion even worth saving?

In my opinion, we need public theologians who will knowledgeably and insightfully address new discoveries in science as well as new advances in technology. Here, in the middle of worldwide excitement and anxiety over the fast-moving developments in Artificial Intelligence, we have the best book to date on this topic.

Noreen Herzfeld holds two doctorates, one in computer science and the other in theology. She teaches in both fields. She knows whereof she speaks. What she says provides me with confidence in the face of an otherwise puzzling, if not threatening, future. 

As a couple interested in the potential impacts of technology, we were immediately drawn to the question this book poses: "Will technology change what it means to be human?" In 2084, John Lennox addresses this question thoughtfully, offering a perspective grounded in both mathematics and philosophy while incorporating insights from his Christian worldview.

What we found truly compelling about this book was how Lennox draws parallels between the nature of humanity and the possibilities and limitations of AI. He delves into the Christian concept of the soul, our inherent moral sense, and our hopes for the future, effectively highlighting the distinction between machines and human beings.

Just when I thought the future was bright and sunny (in part due to Kurzweil), I learn from James Barrat that ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) might well mark the end of our species (and the start of an ever-expanding artificial replacement).

I was fascinated by the people Barrat introduces us to like an expert on the psychology of ASI, and his description of a perfect machine and its runaway implications. I realized this is modernity at its best and worst: we push forward to improve the world but are always at the risk of creating new, unseen problems.

The most troubling question of all (to my way of thinking) is that our idea of perfected humanity (both a modern and a pre-modern aim) ends in the vision of machines like Watson playing endless games of Jeopardy among themselves.

Thanks to the evocative prose in Yvonne Woon’s If You, Then Me, I found myself swept up in the protagonist Xia’s vision of the Bay Area as a perfect paradise, despite the fact that I definitely know better.

I was rooting for Xia, a talented but lonely coder whose best friend is her AI app, even when she started making all kinds of questionable choices. Though I’ve seen this book characterized as a rom com, I actually think it’s more of a modern fairy tale—in all the best ways. 

I loved this book because it completely reframed how I think about AI’s physical and environmental footprint.

While reading, I realized how often discussions about artificial intelligence ignore the material world behind the screens. Crawford’s perspective pushed me to think beyond software and consider labor, extraction, energy, and global inequality. It challenged my own assumptions as a technology scholar and reminded me that every algorithm is embedded in real-world systems.

This book expanded my understanding of AI from a technical issue into a planetary one, which I found both unsettling and essential.

When I’m not developing AI methods (or writing about them) I read. Most of what I read is science fiction. There’s nothing more imaginative than a good science fiction book, and many science fiction stories have inspired us to develop whole new technologies. This one probably won’t do that, but it has such a bizarre mind-bending world that I couldn’t resist recommending it. Niven is great at this kind of thing – the Ringworld books were a favourite of mine as a kid, and frankly, I could recommend another 30 of his books. But Integral Trees is entertaining, a little bizarre, and it even has diagrams to illustrate the underlying concepts at the start – what more could you ask for in a science fiction book?