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Forget Candy Crush and Read the Best Books of 2013

Blog / Produced by The High Calling
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Christians are people of the Word. When God spoke creation into existence, he used words. When John described the coming of Jesus, he wrote, “In the beginning was the Logos,” the Word.

Since Gutenberg first printed the Bible, people have come to think of words and books as two sides of the same coin. In a practical sense, loving words meant loving books. Loving God’s word meant carrying a Bible and studying it daily until its pages yellowed and its margins filled with notes.

The High Calling continues to gather people around words, though most of our digital words do not appear in printed books. Even so, we remain committed to the technology of books. Our distractible world needs single purpose devices like books. When you open them to read, you don’t have to worry about flashing ads, chiming notifications, or the basic temptation to stop reading and go play Candy Crush.

A printed book does one thing only, and printing technology has been perfected over centuries to do that one thing with excellence.

Feel free to download your favorite casual game to your favorite multi-purpose device. Please continue to read The High Calling on your digital devices, and we invite you to revisit the Best (and sometimes most challenging) Books we read in 2013 at The High Calling.

Every Good Endeavor

by Tim Keller and Katherine Leary Alsdorf

“I believed God had a purpose for me as a worker and leader, along with many other people who could make a positive difference in the world. But in the competitive, win-at-all-costs workplace where I had to manage and lead, I had no idea how to live out God’s plan.” [Read More]

Die Empty

By Todd Henry

A great many people “regret not having treated their life with more purpose, and would give anything to have one more chance to approach it with the kind of intention and conviction that imminent death makes palpable.” [Read More]

The Secrets of Happy Families

by Bruce Feiler

“You have your job; you work on that. You have your garden, your hobbies, you work on those. Your family requires just as much work, if not more. The most important thing agile [software development] taught me is that you have to make a commitment to always keep working to improve your family.” [Read More]

Decisive

by Dan and Chip Heath

Do you want to know how to defeat that dark villain of the narrow mindset? Avoid binary solutions, ultitrack, and find someone who has solved the problems you are working to solve. Dan and Chip Heath help us think about how we can make better decisions—at work and at home. [Read More]

Follow Me

by David Platt and Francis Chan

“With good intentions and sincere desires to reach as many people as possible for Jesus, we have subtly and deceptively minimized the magnitude of what it means to follow him. We’ve taken the lifeblood out of Christianity and put Kool-Aid in its place.” [Read More]

Image courtesy of Laity Lodge Youth Camp, one of our sister programs in the Foundations for Laity Renewal.

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