On My Shelf: Life And Books With Timothy Larsen

On My Shelf helps you get to know various writers through a behind-the-scenes glimpse into their lives as readers.

I asked Timothy Larsen—historian, Wheaton College professor, and author of The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One—about what’s on his bedside table, his favorite fiction, the books he regularly revisits, and more.

What’s on your nightstand right now?

I always have a lot of books going at once. There is a category of touchstone nonfiction books from the past that you often hear referred to and see cited. I always feel a sense of personal triumph when I can say I have actually read one of those, and so I am currently tackling Will Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955).

I am an ambitious person trying to mentor ambitious grad students who want to follow Jesus. I am slowly beginning to grasp that a big part of navigating these realities better is learning to appreciate the gift and goodness of our limitations. In my historiography class, we read the whole of Ecclesiastes aloud over the course of the semester. These ongoing meditations have led me to Kelly M. Kapic’s You’re Only Human (2025).

My wife (Jane) and I always have a read-aloud book going together. Our current one is Rosanne Limoncelli’s The Four Queens of Crime: A Mystery (2025). Its hoot of a premise is that Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and the gang are the guest attractions for a charity fundraiser at which, of course, a murder takes place . . .

What are your favorite fiction books?

As that last answer indicates, Jane and I both read an endless stream of cozy detective fiction. I am always scheming to get my hobbies and entertainment to count as “work,” and a recent coup is that I have talked Furman University into paying me to give a public lecture on Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi Small series.

I am slowly beginning to grasp that a big part of navigating ambition better is learning to appreciate the gift and goodness of our limitations.

The Victorian author Anthony Trollope wrote close to 50 novels. I have read most of them, and think that he is wildly underrated. He does have an irritating habit of putting a protagonist in a threating situation and then leaving them dangling there until the reader is starting to get compassion fatigue. Still, Trollope is a genius at the small vanities, compromises, self-justifications, schemes, and aspirations that make up our lives. Unlike Dickens’s, Trollope’s villains slide gently downward in ways that we can readily imagine happening to ourselves—and his heroes still have the kind of petty faults and dubious rationalizations we all have.

The one novel that has perhaps most influenced me is Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945).

What biographies or autobiographies have most influenced you and why?

These are genres that I strongly and continually gravitate toward. I am a historian, and I think of them as human-sized histories. Every section of a biography or autobiography invites a comparison or contrast and then a meditation on one’s own life and the lives of the people you are close to: What does this make me think about my own childhood? Education? Career? Chosen relationships? And so on.

I am the founder and general editor of Oxford University Press’s Spiritual Lives series. Benjamin Disraeli once joked that when he wanted to read a novel, he wrote one; my corresponding quip is that when I want to read a biography, I commission one. Alan Jacobs on Dorothy L. Sayers is currently in production and now available for preorder! Not far behind it is a book that should be published in the first half of 2027, Obbie Tyler Todd’s John D. Rockefeller: The Baptist Baron.

As to autobiographies, just to take one example, I was utterly charmed by the central conceit and droll tone of The Education of Henry Adams (1907).

Sort of combining both genres, I passionately want more people to read Eleanor Vandevort’s A Leopard Tamed (1968) (Elisabeth Elliot wrote the introduction). It is both a memoir of Vandevort’s time as a Presbyterian missionary in the Sudan and a biography of Kuac, an early convert who went on to become a pastor. I did not realize the degree to which a condescending attitude toward that era of evangelicals and missionaries had crept into my heart until I was floored and humbled by this poignant, powerful book.

What are some books you regularly reread and why?

To be honest, I am not a habitual rereader. The main exception to that statement is poetry. I am always rereading poems, most frequently those by T. S. Eliot. One of things that happens recurringly to professors is that a student will show up in your office and want to talk about how devastated they are because of a recent romantic break-up. Sometimes I give them some lines from The Four Quartets:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

One student told me she wrote it out by hand and taped it to her bathroom mirror!

What books have most profoundly shaped how you serve and lead others for the sake of the gospel?

When I was a young adult starting out in ministry, I was exhilarated and transformed by three authors in particular: Dietrich Bonhoeffer (especially Life Together and Letters and Papers from Prison), Helmut Thielicke (especially A Little Exercise for Young Theologians and The Trouble with the Church), and everything Lesslie Newbigin wrote in the last two decades of his life. I am still grateful for each of them.

Looking back, I can see that these three authors were all addressing the same concern in my mind. The propaganda of secular modernity exuded the assumption that faith was outmoded, obscurantist, discredited, and the like.

Part of the way this manipulative messaging worked was what Charles Taylor in A Secular Age identifies as “stadial” schemes. I think of them as a kind of sleight of hand that makes an assertion look like an argument. You just make up multiple stages (strangely, almost always three), then claim they supersede each other and therefore that anyone who is still thinking or acting in certain ways is now officially behind the times. You should be embarrassed and rush to join the more advanced stage we are supposedly now in. Was I a Christian just because I had been raised by people behind the times, and if I only was smart, and brave, and well-read enough I would realize that faith was no longer creditable?

Bonhoeffer, Thielicke, and Newbigin—each in his own way—bore witness against such fears. They had read all the acids of modernity, all the latest theories and criticisms, and moved in the most elite, secular, intellectual circles. Yet they knew, as Newbigin put in in the subtitle of Truth to Tell (1991), that the gospel was public truth that could be proclaimed with confidence in the face of every form of modern thought.

And once you have imbibed that reality, it is always worth looping back to A Little Exercise for Young Theologians to remind yourself not to let your “proper confidence” (another Newbigin title—that one from 1995), degenerate into an off-putting, jargon-spouting, self-important arrogance.

What’s one book you wish every pastor would read?

Henri J. M. Nouwen’s In the Name of Jesus (1989). I am a charismatic, and I was discipled by wise and godly men who were prominent leaders in the charismatic movement, to whom I owe an incalculable debt. Every stream, however, is strong on some things more than others, and it was bracing to have Nouwen tell me that my fantasies about my ministry becoming more and more relevant, spectacular, and powerful might actually be temptations to be resisted. Nouwen’s little book is a meditation on the three temptations that Christ resisted in the wilderness.

You want to be relevant? But why do you not think of a faithful, private ministry of prayer as part of what it means to have a “relevant” ministry?

Or here is a reflection on Satan’s third attempt:

What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people.

When I was 4 years old, the house next to ours came up for sale. My mother sat me down and said let’s pray that a boy your age moves in there who can be your friend. Rich moved in, and he has been my friend ever since, though I have lived in three different countries over the years. Rich’s parents actively warned him against church and Christians as people who just want your money and the like.

Why do you not think of a faithful, private ministry of prayer as part of what it means to have a ‘relevant’ ministry?

Rich has lived through a lot of hard things, including many years of addiction. He came to faith in his early 50s, however, and for some years now he and his wife have been living beautiful Christian lives and are even members of the same church that my parents attended when they were alive.

I am most grateful for the fact that I continued to accompany Rich on his journey, to love him, and to pray for him over all those years. I laugh at myself, however, when I think back on the years when my mental scenario for his salvation was that I would perform a dramatic, public miracle that would convince him that God and the gospel were real. God’s plan was better than mine. My prayers in the name of Jesus were answered, but the way they were answered did not include me being spectacular.

What’s your best piece of writing advice?

The kind of writing I mostly do arises from research. Don’t rush or cut corners when doing the research. When you have lived with the sources in a deep and sustained way, the ideas—and even some of the phrases—will readily emerge. Always write down a good turn of phrase when one pops into your head.

I will often be years away from finishing the research and starting to write the book, but, even then, I will be putting into my research notes little fragments of prose that occur to me that I think might delight the reader when it comes time to write that chapter.

What are you learning about life and following Jesus?

I used to teach medieval theology, and one year I invited a Benedictine monk who was a friend of a colleague of mine to come and talk to the class about Benedictine spirituality. That was when I first learned about the Benedictine value of stability.

Stability is a commitment to stay in the same place with the same people. Another temptation that is common in the charismatic world I come from is to become the kind of fool whose eyes wander to the ends of the earth—my ministry could finally become truly spectacular, if I just ditched my current duties and associates and moved on to something else that at this moment looks awfully shiny from here.

Obviously, God does sometimes call us to new places and people, but I think we live in a highly restless and distractible age, and therefore the Holy Spirit keeps reminding me about the value of stability, of continuing the race set before us, of a long obedience in the same direction, of the cumulative fruits that come from continuity, and of the call to faithfulness and perseverance.