The books that built the tradition.

Proverbs

Scripture

The formation manual of the Old Testament, written by a father for a son. Read one chapter per week with your son. There are thirty-one chapters. It addresses the exact questions your son will face.

Read with your son.

Deuteronomy, Chapters 4 through 8

Scripture

These chapters contain the covenantal charge to the fathers of Israel. Chapter 6 is the foundational text of covenantal formation. God commands fathers to teach His words to their sons when they sit, when they walk, when they lie down, and when they rise up.

Read with your son.

The Gospel of John

Scripture

The theological foundation of covenant sonship. The relationship between Father and Son that structures the Gospel is the model for every father-son relationship in formation.

Read with your son.

The Freedom of a Christian

Martin Luther

Luther wrote it in 1520 and its argument is the doctrinal foundation of every sermon every colonial preacher ever preached on liberty. The Christian is at once the freest of all and the bondservant of all.

Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book Four

John Calvin

Read Book Four. The chapters on civil government are the political theology that crossed the Atlantic in the bones of every Puritan and Presbyterian who built the colonies.

Simply Jesus

N.T. Wright

Wright places Jesus inside Second Temple Judaism, the Roman occupation, and the messianic expectation in a way that makes the political weight of the Gospel visible.

The Cost of Discipleship

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer wrote it before the Gestapo arrested him and lived its argument until the day he was hanged. The chapter on cheap grace and costly grace is the test the modern American church has failed.

The Pursuit of God

A.W. Tozer

Read this when the formation feels mechanical. Tozer pulls the man who has been doing the work back to the source the work was always for. Short. It will undo you and put you back together. Read it once a year.

Beautiful Outlaw

John Eldredge

Eldredge strips away the domesticated, institutional version of Jesus and recovers the actual personality of Christ as the Gospels record it. Fierce. Playful. Disruptive. Fully alive. This is not theology for the faint of heart.

The Declaration of Independence

Primary Source

Read aloud with your son once a year. Every word. The Declaration is not a historical document to be studied. It is a covenant to be spoken. Your son should hear it from your voice before he reads it on a page.

Read with your son.

Washington's Farewell Address

Primary Source

The greatest single act of civic formation in American history. A man leaving power and telling a nation what it would need to survive. Every warning Washington issued has proven prophetic.

Read with your son.

The Federalist Papers, Numbers 1, 10, 39, 51, and 84

Primary Source

Madison and Hamilton explaining the moral architecture of the Constitution. Number 51 is the argument for separated powers grounded in the reality of human nature. A father who reads these five papers will understand the design of the Republic at a level most Americans never reach.

Political Sermons of the American Founding Era

Ellis Sandoz, editor

Sandoz collects fifty-five of the most significant political sermons preached between 1730 and 1805. Read Mayhew's 1750 sermon first. Then West. Then Langdon.

The New England Soul

Harry Stout

Stout argues that the sermon was the central intellectual and cultural document of New England for a century and a half. The argument is the central historical claim the formation tradition rests on.

The New England Clergy and the American Revolution

Alice Baldwin

Baldwin documents the specific role of the New England clergy in producing the ideas that the Declaration later expressed. Her thesis is the formation tradition in scholarly form.

Christians in the American Revolution

Mark Noll

A careful historian who refuses to oversimplify and refuses to dismiss. The Christian content of the Revolution made visible.

His Excellency: George Washington

Joseph Ellis

The man whose private formation produced the public restraint that made the Republic possible. Ellis writes Washington as a man under sustained pressure who chose against the temptations every founding general has faced.

1776

David McCullough

McCullough tells the human story of the Revolution with the specificity the tradition requires. Washington in this book is not a monument. He is a man under pressure making decisions that could end the cause.

Bunker Hill

Nathaniel Philbrick

The men who fought at Bunker Hill were not professional soldiers. They were farmers and tradesmen formed by the tradition. Your son should see what that formation produced when it was tested.

The Radicalism of the American Revolution

Gordon Wood

Wood makes the serious historical argument for what the Revolution actually was. The most radical transformation of society in modern history. Gives the long view that makes the formation tradition's stakes legible.

Democracy in America

Alexis de Tocqueville

Read Volume One Part Two on the township system. Read Volume Two Part Four on the soft despotism that would replace it if the formation tradition collapsed. Tocqueville saw both possibilities in 1831. He was right about both.

Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

Primary Source

The self-formation of a man who built himself from nothing. Franklin had no pedigree, no inheritance. A printing press and a discipline of self-improvement that produced one of the most capable men in American history.

Read with your son.

Jonathan Edwards: A Life

George Marsden

The biography of the most rigorous theological mind America produced. Marsden writes Edwards in his eighteenth-century context without softening him for modern readers.

George Whitefield: The Life and Times

Arnold Dallimore

Two volumes. Dallimore tracks Whitefield across his thirteen Atlantic crossings and his seven American tours with the detail the man requires.

Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans

Plutarch

Start with the lives of Cato, Cincinnatus, and Solon. These were Washington's models. Your son should know these men by name, by decision, by specific act of virtue or sacrifice.

Read with your son.

Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle

Aristotle's argument that virtue is a trained capacity, not a personality trait. Courage, prudence, justice, and temperance are built through repeated action under real conditions.

On Duties

Cicero

The clearest statement of republican virtue in the classical tradition. The most widely read book in the colonial period after the Bible. A man's duty to the commonwealth is inseparable from his duty to his own character.

History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides

Read the Funeral Oration of Pericles and the Sicilian Expedition. These two passages contain the full arc of a republic's rise and fall. The Founders read both as warnings written directly for them.

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

A Roman emperor who held himself to a standard in private that most men cannot meet in public. Self-governance begins with the governance of one's own mind. The colonial founders read him with care.

Father Hunger

Douglas Wilson

Wilson makes the theological argument for covenantal fatherhood with precision and force. A father who reads this book will understand why his role cannot be delegated and what happens to a son when it is.

Family Driven Faith

Voddie Baucham

The practical framework for faith transmission in the home. The family, not the church program, is the primary instrument of formation. Gives the structure to implement what the formation tradition demands.

The Abolition of Man

C.S. Lewis

Seventy pages. Lewis names the philosophical mechanism of the rebreaking before it had reached full depth. The phrase men without chests is the diagnosis. The book is the prescription.

Orthodoxy

G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton argues that Christian faith is not the enemy of reason. It is the foundation of rational order. A man who reads Orthodoxy will understand why the founding tradition rooted liberty in theology.

The Spirit of the Disciplines

Dallas Willard

Willard recovers the spiritual disciplines as the ordinary means by which the man who has been set free is formed into the kind of man who can live as a free man. The operating manual for the post-conversion life.

A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

Eugene Peterson

Peterson works through the Songs of Ascent and recovers the long obedience that is the actual shape of Christian formation. The corrective to every program that promises in months what the text says takes decades.

Humility

Andrew Murray

Murray names the disposition without which formation does not produce the man it claims to produce. Short and difficult. The difficulty is the point. Read annually.

The Imitation of Christ

Thomas a Kempis

The medieval voice that survived the corruption of the medieval church and still speaks. Has been read by every serious Christian for six centuries because it speaks at the level the soul actually lives.

A Free People's Suicide

Os Guinness

Guinness argues that liberty cannot survive without the formation tradition that produces internally governed men. The contemporary version of John Adams's letter on the moral and religious people.

Mere Christendom

Douglas Wilson

The case that Christian formation is the precondition of political liberty made without apology. The corrective to the personal-piety-only Christianity that has accommodated the rebreaking.

Letters and Papers from Prison

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer wrote these from a Gestapo prison in the last two years of his life. The man who wrote them had read the same texts the colonial preachers read and reached the same conclusions about what was required.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

Martin Luther King Jr.

King applies the resistance theology of the colonial preachers to the civil rights situation of 1963 with the precision of a man who knew exactly what he was doing. One of the most important political sermons of the twentieth century.

A Christian Manifesto

Francis Schaeffer

Schaeffer's diagnosis of the rebreaking applied directly to the late twentieth century. Named the situation in 1981. The situation has only deepened. The argument has only sharpened.

If

Rudyard Kipling

Poem

Thirty-two lines. Contains the entire formation tradition in compressed form. Read aloud with your son. Memorize it together. A standard against which he can measure himself for the rest of his life.

Read with your son.