All of the books presented in this website are chosen for being ‘Christian-friendly’. This means that each book is compatible with the Christian ethos. More than that, we hope that each book found here can be profitable to our readers.
However, this does not mean that the books presented here are explicitly Christian. Most of them are not. The books on our list come from a variety of traditions and cover a wide range of topics. We have selected them for you because we consider them to be appropriate for Christian readers. By this we mean that they describe something true and worth knowing about God’s creation.
Books do not need to be explicitly Christian in their content to be appropriate and beneficial for Christian children. There is certainly a role for books that catechise people in the faith, but every good and beautiful book can help a child to mature in healthy ways. Indeed most of the books in this project are not concerned overtly with faith, and some even come from other traditions: including Islam and Judaism.
We count a book as being profitable to Christians if it is truthful and beautiful. Such books point upwards to Truth and Beauty. When you are choosing literature for children you need to be careful that a book does not harm the child by turning them away from a worldview where they appreciate the goodness of God. However, anything that inspires the soul to look around them at truth, beauty, and goodness, essentially is preparing them for communion with God.
As the psalm (23) says: ‘The earth is the Lords and all that is in it, the whole world and all who dwell in it. For He founded it upon the seas and made it ready upon the rivers’. Modern secularism likes to say that religion is something restricted to a limited set of ‘practices’ but this is not so. As Christians we rather believe that all of creation is Christian. What is good and what is beautiful belongs to the Lord and was created for our use and appreciation. ‘Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights’ (James 1:17).
As Christian parents we need not to be afraid of letting our children explore reality. We have no reason to fear learning about any aspect of the world (as long as this is done in an age appropriate way). We do however want to be careful in what data points we give to our children because we want to avoid ideologies that present a distorted view of the created world. Our children will not lose their faith because they saw the truth: they would only lose their intimacy with the Lord if they started to believe lies. Sin is the only thing that is distant from God: and sin takes His creation and corrupts it.
We don't want to limit ourselves to books about bible stories and lives of saints. These books can also be good, but on this website we include any book that we feel is profitable to a person. Indeed, we frankly hope that non-Christians will find this list useful as well. It is our wish that anyone who desires good quality literature will find our project useful.
God looked upon his creation and declared that it was good. All of the books that we have included on this list depict some aspect of goodness. Children read books because they want to learn about the world around them. Learning about what is true and good gives them a solid foundation for the rest of their lives. We hope that our list will bring profit to children of all faiths.
Nevertheless, a small selection of our books is explicitly Christian and intended for Catechising children in the faith. Where this is the case we indicate it in the description of the book. We will also indicate when a book is aimed at a particular Christian denomination.
