Brian G. Hedges's Blog

I’ve already scanned through a number of best books of 2020 lists from friends and public intellectuals and have filled my shopping carts accordingly. Here’s my list, with a few caveats: (1) These weren’t necessarily published in 2020. They’re just my favorites from what I read last year. (2) I decided not to include books I was re-reading, of which there were quite a few (e.g. from favorite

I once worked in a stockroom with an atheist named Bubba. That wasn’t his real name, but the nickname he went by. I frequently shared my faith with coworkers, and the management had already warned Bubba that I might raise the subject with him. “They told me about you,” Bubba informed me shortly into our first shift together. He promptly declared his atheism, maybe trying to head off my

I love to read people’s best books reading lists at the end of each year and often choose several books for my reading pile based on these lists. Perhaps my list will be helpful for your pile. 



Here are fifteen of my favorite books from 2019. 

Note: these aren’t necessarily books published in 2019, just books that I read (or at least read portions of) last year. They are in no particular

When I was eighteen, I fell asleep at the wheel. My dad was preaching at a church two hundred miles from the farm where we lived in Tokio, Texas. We left early enough that morning to make the three-hour drive and arrive before the hymns began. I was driving while Dad went over notes for his sermon, prayed, and took a brief nap.We both woke up at the same time, as the minivan careened right,

My new book, Watchfulness: Recovering a Lost Spiritual Discipline is now shipping from Reformation Heritage Books. 



Here is a brief excerpt from the book, followed by endorsements from Don Whitney, Derek Thomas, Steve Lawson, and others. 



The Value of the Heart 



Watchfulness is needful because the heart is valuable. According to A. W. Pink, keeping the heart is “the great task which

Flickr/nymo59


The first Evangelical Protestant to catalog a list of what we now call spiritual disciplines was Richard Rogers. This list was found in book three of Rogers’ Seven Treatises — and this third book is soon to be republished by Reformation Heritage Books as Holy Helps for a Godly Life. Rogers divided these “helps” into public and private helps for godliness, and among the

“And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil.” (Luke 4:1)
The good news in the story of Jesus’ temptation is that Jesus obeyed God and defeated temptation at every point where Israel, and Adam, and you and I have failed! Jesus was tempted as our brother, captain, and king. Adam, our first

"The third incomparable benefit of faith is that it unites the soul with Christ as a bride is united with her bridegroom. By this mystery, as the Apostle teaches, Christ and the soul become one flesh (Eph. 5:31–32). And if they are one flesh and there is between them a true marriage— indeed the most perfect of all marriages, since human marriages are but poor examples of this one true marriage—

Reset: Living a Grace-Paced Life in a Burnout Culture by David Murray is an excellent treatment of the problems men (especially pastors) face in midlife and the need for intentional rest, renewal, and restoration. 

Murray relates how his own experience of burnout and resulting health problems in his forties led to serious changes in his lifestyle. 

This book is, in many ways, like Wayne