Suppose you correspond with someone you cannot visit. A friendship develops and the conversation branches out in many directions—politics, literature, music, childhood, marriage, whatever—ending up for today in a consideration of religion / spirituality / ethics / morality, the gamut. Your faithful correspondent—whom you respect and feel comfortable with, and who has much more free time than you do—writes to you, “Tell me three things to read that will give me the best possible sense of *your* approach to such questions.”

What would you say? What three works would you name?

If the issue were English poetry, my answers today would be: Hamlet, Paradise Lost, and The Hunting of the Snark.

But that’s not the issue. The issue today is what three works give someone else (-and someone I like, someone I respect, who is asking in an attempt to get to know me better, not to raise a ruckus of any kind) the best sense of *my* approach to religious / spiritual / moral / ethical questions.

I would say the Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle, the Bible, and the great Summa of Aquinas. I think anyone familiar with those three works—whatever he thought of them—would have a good sense of how I’ve come to think about such matters.

What three books would you list?

If you’re not interested in religion or in spirituality but only in ethics and morality, just list three about that.

I ask out of simple curiosity. I’m not angling for an argument of any sort here. I want to see which titles come up the most often, and which ones are new to me!

[Cross-posted in Atheists, Christian Talk, Christianity Unplugged, Politics, and The Lion’s Den.]