Skip to main content

Mere Orthodoxy exists to create media for Christian renewal. Support this mission today.

Titles that Need a Book

July 17th, 2010 | 1 min read

By Matthew Lee Anderson

Over the past few months, I have been incredibly grateful for the incredible feedback and support in my hour of need:  coming up with a title for my yet unfinished book.

It’s an enormous challenge to name a book (though not as large a challenge, I’m finding, as writing it).  But some combinations of words are so good, so potent and insightful, that they simply need a book to go with them.  Purpose-driven titling doesn’t wait for the book to be written.  The book is the title’s completion, not the other way around.

Exhibit A:  Austin Farrer’s Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited. That is a deeply poetic title.  It’s the sort of title that makes significant demands on its author (and the sort of title, I think, only a great author could come up with).   If there wasn’t already a book with that title, I would feel a sense of obligation to write one, regardless of whether anyone read it.  That title needs a book to be complete.

I suspect there are other titles that fall into this category.  I’m curious to hear your suggestions:  what titles can we come up with that don’t currently have books, but should?  (If he plays, I expect great things from Jim.)  Use Amazon as the standard reference.  For our purposes, if it’s not on Amazon, it doesn’t exist.

Note also that it need not be theological titles, or even non-fiction.

Matthew Lee Anderson

Matthew Lee Anderson is an Associate Professor of Ethics and Theology in Baylor University's Honors College. He has a D.Phil. in Christian Ethics from Oxford University, and is a Perpetual Member of Biola University's Torrey Honors College. In 2005, he founded Mere Orthodoxy.