On My Shelf helps you get to know various writers through a behind-the-scenes glimpse into their lives as readers.
I asked Brad Edwards—a pastor and the author of The Reason for Church: Why the Body of Christ Still Matters in an Age of Anxiety, Division, and Radical Individualism—about what’s on his bedside table, his favorite fiction, the book he wishes every pastor would read, and more.
What’s on your nightstand right now?
I’ve recently been going back and forth between two nonfiction books that are right up my alley: the intersection of history, culture, and technology.
The first—A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914–1918, by Joseph Loconte—is a fascinating combination of cultural exegesis and historical biography. It is a fantastic complement to John Hendrix’s delightfully whimsical and gorgeously illustrated book, The Mythmakers (also about Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship).
Loconte has the rare ability to zoom in and out and back again without missing a beat, bringing in just enough historical context to make you see the familiar in a new light without getting bogged down or distracted by tangents. The result is a kind of literary and cultural road map that connects Lewis and Tolkien’s world with ours in a very fresh way.
The second is Paul Kingsnorth’s latest, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. I hold this very loosely because this is my first venture into his work and I’m only a few chapters in, but I have a hunch it may be one of the most important books written in the last several years (on par with Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation). It’s not just the content or the argument he’s making, either. Kingsnorth’s prose is invigoratingly right-brained, creative, and beautifully effortless to read.
I still can’t tell whether it’s due to or despite his pessimistic outlook, but Kingsnorth’s words reek of hope. It’s as if he’s seen, and perhaps even visited, a world where human nature is unleashed by rightly ordered constraint rather than enslaved by discarding the good of our creatureliness. It’s a world I’d love to see more clearly, and hope he continues to fill out in the rest of the book.
What are your favorite fiction books?
Fantasy is my first love. In third grade, I started devouring anything with chivalrous knights and wizards, or damsels in distress and dragons. At one point, I tore through a Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms novel every few days. Arthur and his knights were friends as well as characters. The worlds of Narnia and Middle-earth were more than an escape for a kid feeling caught between his divorcing parents; they were more familiar and more real than the one I resided in.
Even before I became a Christian toward the end of college, I sensed that they were pointing me to another world that infused mine with meaning. To paraphrase Lewis, it was reading fantasy that prepared me for “the fairy tale that is really true.”
Now that I’m an adult, The Lord of the Rings of course reigns supreme, but two other series continue to occupy my imagination long after reading them: Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga and Lewis’s Space Trilogy.
I didn’t really appreciate what I was getting myself into when, in late 2024, I started reading Wingfeather to my oldest son at bedtime. It took us well into 2025, not least because of the time it took me to answer all the questions about life and death; God and man; and, especially, fathers and sons (“Daddy, why are you crying again?” “Because, buddy, that’s how much Daddies love their boys . . .”).
Peterson has given the world a generational masterpiece. In fact, not only is it this generation’s Chronicles of Narnia, but I’d go so far as to argue (with great fear and trembling to admit this in writing) that it’s as good or better than Lewis’s Narnia. I’ve read both to my oldest son (now 9 years old), but it’s Wingfeather that he occasionally asks if his younger brother (4 ½) is old enough yet for us to read with him.
Speaking of Lewis, the first time I read his Space Trilogy, I almost couldn’t believe that it was written in the 1930s and ’40s and not the 1980s or ’90s—primarily due to his vision of advanced technology. Maybe it’s because I’m older and (I hope) wiser now, but when I read it for the third time this past summer I was again stunned, but this time by how he seems to have anticipated the social and anthropological challenges of the 2010s through the present (regarding gender, especially).
The first novel, Out of the Silent Planet, explores a fallen and redeemed masculinity. His surprisingly dark sequel, Perelandra, uses contrast to cast a regal vision of creational femininity. But it isn’t until That Hideous Strength that you realize the entire series is a sci-fi outworking of The Abolition of Man.
That Hideous Strength starts slow and without much obvious connection to the previous two books, but the last half is a surreal ride that includes Merlin, cosmic angels, and demons speaking through a decapitated head. It all adds up to an unexpected yet indispensable resource for anyone trying to wrap their minds around the potential disruption in the wake of artificial intelligence.
What books have most profoundly shaped how you serve and lead others for the sake of the gospel?
The books I’ve found most helpful in pastoral ministry are not those that offer new ways of doing, but new ways of seeing. Application is great, but the more post-Christian our culture becomes, the more quickly even the best application becomes dated. Several books come to mind as offering practical perspectives that have proven both timeless and timely for our cultural moment, but I’ll limit myself to three(ish).
At the top of the list is Tim Keller’s landmark book The Reason for God. While the objections he covered in each chapter are specific to the rise of New Atheism and, therefore, a bit topically dated, it’s impossible to overstate how much his “defeater beliefs” and pastoral posture have influenced how I see my role as a pastor and church planter. The title of my book, The Reason for Church, is more than a homage to that contribution; it’s the only way to give sufficient credit for how much Keller’s life and ministry have indelibly shaped my own.
Alan Noble’s You Are Not Your Own is still, hands-down, the single best extrapolation of secular individualism, its pervasive and still-growing influence in Western society, and how dehumanizing it is without robust, church-based discipleship. Our church, The Table, hands it out for free to anyone who promises to read it from cover to cover because, as the meme goes, “once you see it, you can’t unsee it.”
This isn’t a Christian book, but reading Yuval Levin’s A Time to Build (side by side with Andy Crouch’s Playing God) opened my eyes to the glaring gap in my own ecclesiology: the institutional nature of the church. Their respective emphases on responsible leadership (Levin) and rightly stewarded power (Crouch) offer both a polemic and an apologetic for modern institutions—we insist we can’t live with ’em, but we can’t live without ’em.
It’s impossible to read them and still think that yet more individual power or autonomy can offer society a way out of our dysfunction. More importantly, they offer a gold mine’s worth of resources to help Christians and non-Christians alike taste and see that individualism is not good and can’t deliver on any of its promises.
With these books combined, the goodness and beauty of God’s promises to his people, and the ordinary means of grace he offers through his people, become much, much clearer.
What’s one book you wish every pastor would read?
I’m going to both cheat and risk making a serious faux pas by answering with my book, The Reason for Church—but not for reasons commercial or selfish. I wrote my book because I couldn’t answer this question without listing a score or more of books that all seemed to describe the challenges and opportunities of our cultural moment from slightly different but complementary perspectives.
It took the COVID-19 pandemic’s rapid acceleration of existing trends for me to see that radical individualism was the root of all our symptoms, and I wanted The Reason for Church to be a sort of “home base” from which to strike out and explore further the more comprehensive treatments that I could only scratch the surface of (and I used footnotes rather than endnotes, because I’m not a barbarian).
What’s your best piece of writing advice?
Don’t overthink it. As a verbal processor, I knew it’d be a challenge to get out of my head while writing a book, and it never would have happened if I hadn’t had a good friend and conversation partner who regularly challenged me to stop overthinking and just say, out loud and into the void if need be, what I’m trying to put on paper. I’ve heard his voice in my head at least three times while writing this, and it seems to knock something loose almost every time.
What are you learning about life and following Jesus?
In ways that continue to surprise me, writing The Reason for Church opened my eyes to how thoroughly individualism has subtly indoctrinated us to achieve our identity (through self-discovery and self-construction) rather than receive who we are in Christ (by grace, through faith). And the more I understood individualism’s soul-crushing tradeoffs, the more I started seeing where I’ve been compromised by the same indoctrination and have yet to fully source my significance, meaning, and purpose in Jesus.
Recently, I’ve been grappling with how little rest or receiving seems to characterize how I view faithfulness. That wasn’t a conscious decision, but it doesn’t have to be. Without realizing it, long-term exposure to individualism’s atmospheric pressure has functionally reduced my definition to little more than “ambition” with a Christian veneer.
Initially, that left me pretty deflated and tempted to chuck agency out with the proverbial bathwater. That started to change with the recovery of a theme John Houmes and I discuss on our podcast, PostEverything—an understanding of faithfulness as stewardship.
Where American ambition seeks to gain or achieve what we don’t have, Christlike stewardship seeks to leverage everything we do have for God’s glory and our neighbor’s good. It is too easy to forget that we are finite creatures immersed in a digital world that expands our awareness with near-godlike omniscience, or provokes our desires with unending reminders of more.
To be called to faithfully steward only the talents God has entrusted to us, and not a mote more, offers a freedom and contentment utterly alien to American ambition. In other words, I’m learning anew what it means for Jesus’s yoke to be easy and his burden light.
