My Desert Island Ten: Faith, Life & the Human Condition

The books that have helped me understand faith, grace, other people — and, occasionally, myself.

Ten books. Ten authors. Some very different perspectives on faith, grace, suffering, hope and what it means to be human. And rather more difficult decisions than I expected.

A Different Kind of Desert Island Library

Having recently put together my Desert Island Ten for fiction, I decided to tackle the other books on my shelves.

Initially, I thought I would simply produce a non-fiction list.

That proved rather more complicated than expected.

There are books about history, politics, music, biography, psychology, theology and all sorts of other subjects that I would hate to be without. But as I started looking through my shelves, I realised that a substantial number of books belonged in a category of their own.

They weren’t simply books that had interested or entertained me. Some had challenged beliefs I had held for years. Others had helped me understand things I thought I already knew. A few had given me language for experiences or feelings that I had previously struggled to explain. And some had made a genuine difference to how I approached life.

So I’ve decided on three separate Desert Island Tens: fiction, general non-fiction, and this one.

Faith, Life & the Human Condition.

It’s a slightly grand title, perhaps, but I think it captures what these books have in common.

Some are explicitly Christian. Others approach human behaviour through psychology. One is an illustrated book that communicates extraordinary wisdom with very few words.

What connects them is that they all have something to say about what it means to live as an imperfect human being. And, as I’ve discovered, that is quite a substantial subject.

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The rules

The rules are broadly the same as those for my fiction list.

One author per selection.

This originated in conversations about favourite music, where allowing unlimited selections from one artist creates the unfortunate possibility of the Beatles occupying most of the list.

I have no intention of allowing Philip Yancey, C. S. Lewis or N. T. Wright to do the literary equivalent.

The rule applies separately to each list, so Lewis can appear here despite already having a place in my fiction selection with The Chronicles of Narnia.

I’m also allowing myself a slightly different criterion. With fiction, the question was principally whether I would enjoy rereading a book over and over again. Here, it is whether a book contains something I would want to keep returning to: an argument, a challenge, an insight, an encouragement or a different perspective.

Not every book on this list is an easy read. Indeed, one of them was distinctly difficult. But a book doesn’t have to be enjoyable in the conventional sense to be enormously valuable.

These aren’t necessarily the ten greatest books ever written about Christianity, psychology or human nature. They’re ten books I would want to have with me. And, as before, there are some painful omissions.

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10. The Compassionate Mind

Paul Gilbert

This is an interesting selection because I can’t honestly claim that I particularly enjoyed reading it. In fact, I found it quite hard work.

The accompanying workbook was considerably easier to engage with, and the concepts became much more meaningful through conversations with my counsellor . But the underlying ideas were genuinely useful.

Gilbert’s work explores compassion not simply as a pleasant sentiment or an admirable quality, but as something connected to how our minds respond to threat, distress and self-criticism.

One of the particularly important ideas is that we can be extraordinarily harsh towards ourselves in ways we would never consider acceptable when speaking to another person. We can recognise someone else’s difficulties, understand why they behaved as they did, and offer them sympathy. Then turn around and judge ourselves by an entirely different standard.

Gilbert offers a psychological framework for understanding why that happens and how a more compassionate response can be developed.

I find that particularly interesting alongside some of the Christian writers elsewhere in this list. There is a difference between intellectually accepting that we are loved and actually treating ourselves as people worthy of compassion. Knowing something and living as though it is true are not always the same thing.

Why take it to the island?

Because it is a book whose value lies in what I learned from it, rather than in the pleasure of reading it.
And because, on a desert island, developing a little more compassion towards the only person permanently available for conversation might be rather useful.
Although I might take the workbook instead.

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9. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

Charlie Mackesy

At the opposite end of the reading experience is Charlie Mackesy’s extraordinary little book.

There is something rather wonderful about a book that can communicate so much through a few drawings and relatively little text. Four unlikely companions travel together, talking about friendship, fear, kindness, courage, love and the difficulties of being alive.

It sounds almost absurdly simple. And in one sense, it is. But simplicity is not necessarily superficiality.

Mackesy has an ability to express something familiar in a way that makes you stop and consider it afresh. The illustrations are an essential part of that achievement. The characters have a warmth and vulnerability that would be difficult to reproduce through words alone.

I also like the fact that the book doesn’t pretend that life is straightforward. Its encouragement isn’t based on the idea that everything is wonderful or that difficulties can be wished away. Rather, it suggests that kindness, friendship and the willingness to accept help matter precisely because life can be difficult.

There is a connection here with Brené Brown and Paul Gilbert, although Mackesy reaches it through a very different route. Sometimes a few carefully chosen words can communicate what an entire chapter of psychology struggles to explain.

Why take it to the island?

Because it’s a book to return to in different moods and circumstances.
And because a little gentleness might be welcome when you’ve been stranded somewhere without a decent cup of tea.

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8. Mere Christianity

C. S. Lewis

Lewis was always likely to appear on this list. He has already earned his place in my fiction selection through The Chronicles of Narnia, but his non-fiction writing deserves consideration in its own right. And Mere Christianity is probably the book I would choose.

What I admire about Lewis is his ability to take complicated ideas and explain them with remarkable clarity. He doesn’t simply state what Christians believe. He attempts to explain why those beliefs might make sense and what follows from accepting them.

His arguments are accessible without being condescending. And he has a wonderful gift for analogy. There are passages where an apparently difficult theological question suddenly becomes considerably clearer because Lewis has found an everyday comparison that illuminates it.

Of course, that doesn’t mean every argument is unanswerable. Nor does it mean that Lewis is always right. But he is an author who invites the reader to think, and I value that enormously.

There is also something appealing about his willingness to discuss Christianity at the level of its central claims rather than becoming absorbed in every denominational disagreement. For a book that emerged from wartime radio talks, it remains remarkably readable.

Why take it to the island?

Because Lewis is excellent company for anyone who enjoys thinking through difficult questions.
And because a desert island might provide sufficient uninterrupted time to work out precisely where I agree with him — and where I don’t.

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7. Surprised by Hope

N. T. Wright

One of the dangers of discussing Christian faith is that it can become almost entirely concerned with what happens to individuals after they die. N. T. Wright challenges that tendency.

In Surprised by Hope, he explores resurrection, Christian hope and the idea of the renewal of creation. His argument is that Christian hope is not simply about escaping this world and going somewhere better. It has implications for how we understand this world and how we live in it now.

That distinction matters. If the future is understood in terms of renewal rather than abandonment, then what we do in the present acquires a different significance. Justice, beauty, compassion, creativity and the work of making things better are not merely ways of occupying ourselves until something more important happens. They matter.

Wright is a substantial theological writer, and he doesn’t always make things easy for the reader. But he has a gift for challenging assumptions that have become so familiar we scarcely notice we’re making them. And that is one of the things I most value in a book.

Why take it to the island?

Because hope is not quite the same thing as optimism.
Optimism suggests that things will probably work out. Hope can persist even when the immediate circumstances offer very little reason for optimism.
That strikes me as a useful distinction to remember on a desert island.

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6. Confessions

Augustine

There is something extraordinary about reading a writer who lived more than sixteen centuries ago and discovering that his questions remain so recognisable.

Augustine’s Confessions is an account of his life, conversion and spiritual struggles, but it is also a remarkable examination of human nature. He is interested in desire, ambition, pride, memory, relationships, belief and the extraordinary ability human beings possess to act against their own better judgement.

One of the questions running through the book is particularly uncomfortable. Why do we sometimes find ourselves wanting things we know are not good for us? Why can we understand what is right, even genuinely wish to do it, and yet remain divided against ourselves?

Augustine’s willingness to examine his own motives is remarkable. He doesn’t present himself as a model of uncomplicated virtue. Instead, he examines his contradictions with a degree of honesty that can still feel startling.

And that is what makes him such an interesting companion to the modern authors in this collection. Brené Brown explores shame and vulnerability. Paul Gilbert examines self-criticism and compassion. Augustine approaches the complexities of human motivation through theology, philosophy and personal reflection.

The vocabulary is different. The human difficulties are often surprisingly familiar.

Why take it to the island?

Because I would want at least one voice from a very different age.
It is a useful reminder that human beings have been struggling with many of the same questions for a very long time.
And that we haven’t necessarily become quite as sophisticated as we like to imagine.

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5. The Cost of Discipleship

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer is an interesting addition because he introduces a rather uncomfortable question into a list containing several books about grace. What does grace actually require of us?

In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer famously distinguishes between what he calls cheap grace and costly grace. Cheap grace is forgiveness treated as a convenient religious entitlement, detached from repentance, discipleship and any serious change in how we live. Costly grace is something altogether more demanding. It is freely given, but it is not trivial.

That distinction creates a productive tension with Brennan Manning, Philip Yancey and Henri Nouwen. Those writers help explain that God’s love is not something we can earn by becoming sufficiently good. Bonhoeffer asks what happens next. If grace is real, does it make no difference to the way we behave? Surely not.

Taking responsibility for our actions is not the same thing as believing that our worth depends entirely upon our performance. Indeed, perhaps understanding grace properly makes it possible to acknowledge our failures without being destroyed by them.

Bonhoeffer’s own life also gives his writing a particular gravity. His opposition to Nazism, involvement in resistance and eventual execution mean that his reflections on discipleship were not merely academic. He understood that convictions can have consequences.

Why take it to the island?

Because a collection devoted entirely to reassurance might eventually become rather comfortable.
Bonhoeffer would make sure that didn’t happen.
And I suspect that would be a good thing.

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4. Daring Greatly

Brené Brown

One of the most useful distinctions I have encountered in psychology comes from Brené Brown’s work on guilt and shame. It is deceptively simple.

Guilt says: “I did something bad.”
Shame says: “I am bad.”

That small difference changes almost everything. With guilt, the problem is something we have done. We can acknowledge it, apologise, make amends and try to behave differently next time. Guilt can therefore be constructive.

Shame is different. It moves the judgement from our behaviour to our identity. Instead of recognising that we have made a mistake, we begin to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with us.

Brown’s work explores how shame, vulnerability, courage and human connection are related. One of her most important arguments is that vulnerability is not the opposite of courage. Very often, it is an essential part of it.

Grace does not mean pretending that wrongdoing doesn’t matter. It means that wrongdoing need not become the final verdict on someone’s worth.

Why take it to the island?

Because the distinction between guilt and shame is one I would want to remember.
And because being able to recognise our imperfections without allowing them to define us seems a rather important part of being human.

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3. The Return of the Prodigal Son

Henri Nouwen

The parable of the Prodigal Son is one of the most familiar stories in the Bible. And I wonder whether its familiarity sometimes prevents us from appreciating just how extraordinary it is.

We often describe it as a story about a young man who behaves badly, loses everything, returns home, apologises and is forgiven. But that description misses something fundamental. The father sees his son while he is still a long way off. And he runs to meet him.

The son has prepared an apology. He intends to confess his wrongdoing and ask to be treated as a servant rather than as a son. But the father doesn’t wait for the whole proposal. He embraces him, and orders the best robe, a ring and sandals. He restores the son’s position in the family and begins preparing a celebration.

The son doesn’t have to earn his way back through a probationary period of suitably impressive behaviour.

The father isn’t merely prepared to forgive him. He is delighted to have him home.

For me, that distinction goes to the heart of grace. Henri Nouwen’s book explores this story through Rembrandt’s extraordinary painting The Return of the Prodigal Son.

Nouwen doesn’t concentrate exclusively on the younger son. There is also the older brother, whose obedience and resentment reveal another way of misunderstanding the father’s love. And ultimately there is the father himself.

Nouwen asks us not only to recognise our need to be welcomed, but also to consider what it means to become someone capable of offering that welcome to others. That is a rather more demanding proposition.

Why take it to the island?

Because the father’s embrace is an image I would want to return to.
And because the story reminds us that being loved is not necessarily the same thing as being rewarded for good behaviour.
Sometimes it is simply about being wanted home.

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2. What’s So Amazing About Grace?

Philip Yancey

Philip Yancey’s What’s So Amazing About Grace? is one of the books that helped me think differently about Christianity.

Grace is a word Christians use constantly. We sing about it, preach about it, discuss it and include it in our theological explanations. But familiarity with a word doesn’t necessarily mean we have understood what it implies.

Yancey’s book examines the extraordinary and often uncomfortable nature of grace. It challenges our instinct to divide the world into people who deserve acceptance and those who don’t. And it explores what happens when forgiveness and generosity extend beyond the boundaries we would naturally establish.

One of the sections I particularly value is his retelling of the Prodigal Son as a modern story about a Prodigal Daughter. By moving the story into a recognisable contemporary setting, Yancey helps restore some of the shock that the original parable can lose through familiarity.

There is also a more difficult reason for returning to this book now. Recent revelations about Yancey’s personal conduct have complicated the relationship between the author and the principles he writes about. I don’t think that is something to ignore or dismiss. But neither do I think it automatically erases the value of everything he has written.

What do we do when someone who writes persuasively about grace fails to live according to the standards they profess? How do we distinguish forgiveness from excusing wrongdoing? And can we continue to value an insight while acknowledging serious failures in the person who communicated it?

I don’t think there are necessarily easy answers. Nor should there be. But perhaps a book about grace ought to make us uncomfortable occasionally.

Why take it to the island?

Because grace is easy to admire in principle and considerably harder to understand in practice.
And because this is a book that still challenges me, including in ways I might not have anticipated when I first read it.

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1. The Ragamuffin Gospel

Brennan Manning

Of all the books in this collection, The Ragamuffin Gospel may have made one of the most significant differences to how I understood my faith.

I grew up with a Christian understanding that placed considerable emphasis on holiness, sin and the importance of living as we ought. Those things are not unimportant. But one consequence was a persistent sense of never quite being good enough.

Grace was something I knew about. I understood the theology. God loved us. God forgave us. That was what God did. Indeed, there was almost a sense that God had to love us because, well, that was his job.

I knew intellectually that grace was freely given. But there is a considerable difference between knowing something in your head and understanding it in your heart. Manning helped bridge that gap.

His central message is that God’s love is not reserved for people who have finally managed to become sufficiently respectable, disciplined or spiritually successful. It is offered to people who are imperfect, inconsistent, frightened, confused and frequently rather disappointing. In other words, people like the rest of us.

But the real change for me was something slightly different.

God doesn’t merely tolerate us because he has promised to. He actually wants us.

That is an extraordinary distinction. There is a difference between being forgiven reluctantly, being accepted out of obligation and being genuinely loved. Between someone putting up with your presence and someone being delighted that you are there.

Manning helped me understand grace in those terms. And that changed something.

It also explains why Brené Brown’s distinction between guilt and shame resonates so strongly with me. It is possible to believe that God forgives our mistakes while still feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with us. Manning challenges that assumption.

He doesn’t argue that our behaviour is irrelevant or that we should avoid taking responsibility. Rather, he suggests that our failures do not determine whether we are worthy of love. That is a profoundly different starting point. And it is one I have found enormously valuable.

Why take it to the island?

Because this is a book that helped something move from intellectual agreement to personal understanding.
I knew about grace before reading Manning. But he helped me begin to understand what it might actually mean to be loved — and wanted — without first having to become someone else.
I can think of few better reasons to take a book with me.

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The Substitutes Bench

Choosing ten means leaving out some remarkable books. And in this particular category, the final decisions have been especially difficult. These two came very close.

Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl

This is an extraordinary book, combining Frankl’s experiences in Nazi concentration camps with his reflections on meaning, suffering and human freedom.

What makes it so compelling is his exploration of the possibility of finding meaning even when circumstances are appalling and much of our freedom has been taken away.

It would also bring a different dimension to the main ten. Where several of my selections examine grace, compassion and self-understanding, Frankl asks how human beings can find purpose in circumstances they cannot change.

But I have a reservation about taking it to a desert island. It is a demanding and, at times, harrowing book. There is a distinction between recognising the extraordinary value of a work and wanting to return to it repeatedly.

Perhaps that is an unfair reason to leave it behind. It is certainly one of the strongest contenders for promotion.

Revelations of Divine Love — Julian of Norwich

Julian offers something rather different. Writing in medieval England, she reflects on suffering, sin, divine love and the relationship between humanity and God.

There is something remarkable about the hopefulness of her vision. Her writing comes from a very different world from our own, yet many of her questions remain recognisable.

She offers a contemplative approach to faith that contrasts with the more analytical writing of Lewis or Wright. I also like the idea of including voices from different centuries.

Augustine provides one perspective from the early Church. Julian offers another from medieval Christianity. Both remind us that questions about love, suffering, faith and the human condition were being explored long before modern psychology or contemporary Christian publishing existed.

She could very easily have made the ten. And I suspect she might yet find her way in.

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A Few Final Thoughts

Looking back over the selections, I’m struck by how much they have in common.

I hadn’t deliberately set out to create a collection about grace, shame, compassion and the difficulty of accepting love. But those themes appear repeatedly.

Manning helped me understand that being loved by God is not simply a theological technicality. Yancey explores the extraordinary implications of grace. Nouwen brings the same ideas to life through the father’s embrace of his returning son. Brown provides a psychological language for distinguishing our behaviour from our worth. Gilbert examines how we might learn to treat ourselves and others with greater compassion. And Mackesy communicates something of that same kindness through illustrations and wonderfully simple observations.

There is a danger, of course, that such a collection could become rather self-reassuring. Which is why I’m glad Augustine and Bonhoeffer are there.

Augustine asks why we remain so divided against ourselves. Bonhoeffer asks what accepting grace actually requires us to do. Those are uncomfortable questions. And they ought to be.

Lewis brings intellectual clarity to the discussion, while Wright introduces the broader Christian hope of renewal and restoration. Together, the books create something of a conversation.

Not all the authors would agree with one another. Some approach their subjects through theology, others through psychology or art. Their assumptions and methods are different. But I think there is value in allowing those different perspectives to sit alongside one another.

Knowing something and understanding it

Perhaps the most important distinction running through this collection is the difference between knowing something intellectually and actually understanding it in a way that changes how we live.

I knew about grace before reading Brennan Manning. I knew that Christians believed God loved them. But understanding that love as something freely and genuinely offered — rather than as a divine obligation — was quite another matter.

Similarly, the difference between guilt and shame looks almost trivial when reduced to two short sentences. Yet the implications are enormous.

Sometimes the most valuable books don’t give us entirely new information. They help us understand something familiar in a fundamentally different way. And that can be life-changing.

Books for different stages of life

I made a similar observation in my fiction list. The words of a book remain the same, but the person returning to them may have changed considerably.

A book that seems unremarkable at twenty might become deeply meaningful at fifty. Equally, a book that once provided enormous comfort might later challenge us in unexpected ways.

That is particularly true of books about faith and human nature. Our experiences change. Our questions change. And occasionally, the answers we thought were perfectly satisfactory turn out to have been rather incomplete.

I suspect I could return to these ten books in another decade and find myself reading some of them quite differently. Perhaps one or two would no longer make the list. Perhaps Julian of Norwich or Viktor Frankl would finally claim a place. And perhaps I would discover an entirely different book that made something important click.

That is part of the pleasure of reading.

The best books don’t necessarily give us the last word on a subject. Sometimes they help us ask better questions.

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Over to You

As with my fiction list, I’d be interested to know what everyone else would choose.

Not necessarily the ten most influential theological works, the most respected psychology books or the titles that appear most frequently on recommended reading lists. But the books that have genuinely made a difference to how you understand life.

Which books have challenged your assumptions? Which have helped you through difficult periods? Which have given you a different understanding of yourself, other people or what you believe?

And which would you want to have with you if you were going to spend the next twenty years on a desert island?

One author per selection, please. Otherwise, in my case, C. S. Lewis and Philip Yancey might end up occupying most of the luggage.

And we have already established that this would be cheating.

Although I reserve the right to reconsider if the island turns out to have a particularly generous baggage allowance.