Against the Fragments: Radical Works by Brilliant Christians
Explore radical works by brilliant Christians in 'Against the Fragments'—a curated list of transformative books challenging norms and inspiring deep faith.
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The Cost of Discipleship
by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Previously published: New York: Macmillan, 1959.
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Grief Observed
by C. S. Lewis
Written after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moment," A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period: "Nothing will shake a man -- or at any rate a man like me -- out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself." This is a beautiful and unflinchingly homest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings.
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The Seven Storey Mountain
by Thomas Merton
A celebration of Merton's spiritual autobiography is accompanied by an introduction from the editor and a note from Merton's biographer.
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Inferno
by Dante Alighieri
The first of the 3 canticles in "La divina commedia "(The Divine Comedy), this 14th-century allegorical poem begins Dante's imaginary journey from Hell to Purgatory to Paradise with his sojourn among the damned. There he encounters historical and mythological creatures -- each symbolic of a particular vice or crime. Translated beautifully by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
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Purgatorio
by Dante Alighieri
"Purgatorio" is the second installment in Dante's Divine Comedy. It relates in 33 cantos the poet's progress, still with Virgil as his guide, up the mountain of purgatory, where souls must wait to expiate their sins on Earth before they enter heaven.
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The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Dostoyevskys masterpiece introduces a world filled with greed, passion, depravity, and complex moral issues, as three brothers become involved in the brutal murder of their own father. This edition features an Afterword by bestselling author Sara Peretsky. Revised reissue.
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The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake
by William Blake
Since its first publication in 1965, this edition has been widely hailed as the best available text of Blake's poetry and prose. Now revised, if includes up-to-date work on variants, chronology of poems and critical commentary by Harold Bloom. An "Approved Edition" of the Center for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association.
