Tag, I’m It!

Michelle did the blog book meme a piece back, and now Revolution of Love has tagged me for the book meme that’s going around the blogosphere, so here goes:

1) Total number of books I own –

A quick estimate of that based on shelf counting, etc., puts the number at about 4,000.


2) The last book I bought –

According to "My Account" at Amazon.Com, that would be

INTO THE TWILIGHT, ENDLESSLY GROUSING by humorist Patrick McManus

3) The last book I read was –

Read all the way through? Well, I just finished (listening to) one today so I s’ppose that would be

THE MAKING OF MODERN ECONOMICS: THE LIVES AND IDEAS OF THE GREAT THINKERS by Mark Skousen

4) Five books that mean a lot to me –

The five books (or sets) that mean the most to me would be the Bible, the Catechism, the Summa Theologiae, the collected decrees of the ecumenical councils, and the collected encyclicals of the popes, but those wouldn’t be very interesting for me to use to answer this question since they are all standard works directly related to my profession.

Therefore, let me offer five that are special to me for other reasons. Each one of the following affected my life in an important way:

  1. THE NEW TESTAMENT DOCUMENTS: ARE THEY RELIABLE? by F. F. Bruce. I read this book when I was a new follower of Christ who had imbibed an awful lot of secularism in high school and college. This book, by an important New Testament scholar, helped me start taking the historical value of the Gospels and the other New Testament documents seriously.
  2. MIRACLES by C. S. Lewis. This one further helped me get over the secular worldview by offering a powerful exploration of the concept of miracles and how they can fit with natural law and science.
  3. SCALING THE SECULAR CITY by J. P. Moreland. This one was a morale boost to me as a developing apologist because it provided an exemplar of Christian apologetics done with the kind of rigorously-argued approach that I craved. As an analytic philosophy student, I thrived on rigorous argumentation, but so few works out there tried to bring this level of work to the defense of the faith. This one did. It’s a modern classic and represents a kind of apologeics that still does not exist in Catholic circles. (Though I don’t like all of Moreland’s treatment of the kalaam argument for creation.)
  4. EARLY CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES by J. N. D. Kelly. Though Kelly is not a Catholic, reading his survey of doctrine in the early Church helped show me just how Catholic the early Church Fathers were.
  5. DR. ATKINS NEW DIET REVOLUTION by Dr. Robert Akins. This is the book that saved me from getting diabetes. I was insulin resistant with rising blood sugar levels when my doctor recommended this book to me. After going on the this diet, I dropped a hundred pounds without hunger. Even before the weight came off, I felt better and had more energy than I had in years. This book opened my eyes to how completely BACKWARDS normal dieting advice is (and thus why all previous diets I had tried had failed so dismally).

5) I tag – (5 bloggers)

Okay, here is a design flaw in this meme. There is no way, given how far it’s spread, that I’m going to go to who knows how many other blogs and search through their archives to see if they’ve already done the meme. Neither am I going to fire off tags to other bloggers irrespective of whether they may have done this meme.

Therefore, I hereby tag all the bloggers reading this who haven’t already been infected by the meme.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

4 thoughts on “Tag, I’m It!”

  4. Tag, We’re All It!

    The book tag meme has made the rounds of the blogosphere, and here I was sitting, eagerly awaiting someone to tag me. This will have to do. Thanks to Jimmy Akin for tagging “all the bloggers reading this who haven’t already been infected by th

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