Christianity Today Book Awards

Here for your consideration are a few of the recent 2013 CT Book Award winners. For even more Christian themed reading suggestions checkout their website.

Man in the Blue Moon (novel) (M)
by Micheal Morris

"*Starred Review* It's 1918, and in the small town of Dead Lakes, Florida, Ella Wallace runs the general store and struggles to raise her three boys and hold on to the family farm, a valuable property that contains a spring said to have curative powers. Town banker Clive Gillespie has his eye on the property and, together with a local evangelist, plans to build a lucrative resort. With the farm foreclosure looming comes the sudden and unconventional arrival of drifter Lanier Stillis, a man with his own mysterious healing powers. Lanier convinces Ella that together they can save the farm by harvesting the local trees. But when Lanier's troubled past catches up with him, the farm and the Wallace family are put in unexpected, life-threatening jeopardy.

Drawing on a story from his grandfather's childhood, Morris has created a magical portrait of a rural southern town on the brink of personal and global change. Richly detailed and highly visual, Man in the Blue Moon carries readers quickly and completely into the heart of this tight-knit rural community. It is a beautifully written and deeply memorable story of abandonment and loss and of the redemptive powers of hard work, faith, and forgiveness." Booklist

Still: notes on a mid-faith crisis  (M)
by Lauren F Winner

"In the critically acclaimed memoir Girl Meets God, Lauren F. Winner chronicled her sojourn from Judaism to Christianity. Now, in Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, Winner describes how experiences of loss and failure unexpectedly slam her into a wall of doubt and spiritual despair: "My belief has faltered, my sense of God's closeness has grown strained, my efforts at living in accord with what I take to be the call of the gospel have come undone."

Witty, relatable, and fiercely honest, Winner lays bare her experience of what she calls the "middle" of the spiritual life. In elegant and spare prose, she explores why -- in the midst of the overwhelming anxiety, loneliness, and boredom of her deepest questioning about where (or if) God is --the Christian story still explains who she is better than any other story she's ever known. Still is an absorbing meditation combining literary grace with spiritual wisdom. It is sure to resonate with anyone looking to sustain a spiritual life in the midst of real life." - Publisher


Where the Conflict Really Lies: science, religion and naturalism  (M)
by Alvin Plantinga

"This book offers topnotch scholarship to pit against the very best arguments of contemporary atheism, as well as to clarify what truly is at stake in the battles orthodoxy faces in science, biblical studies, philosophy, and more. A tour de force by one of our era's great philosophers—and we can be glad, again, that he is on our side!"


Bad Religion: how we became a nation of heretics  (M)
by Ross Douthat

"A searching and illuminating reading of our times that is probing in judgment while sympathetic in mood. It makes sense of the history we have lived in a way that inspires renewed—and im-proved—movement forward."