Reddit mentions: The best teen religion & spirituality books

Einstein I would say wait a little bit, he assumes a pretty decent mathematical background in his readers, so it can get a bit tricky.

Hawking, meh. The man's a genius but he's not good at explaining physics to laypeople imo. His books seem to state things without any indication of how physicists arrived at those conclusions, so they're a bit of a head scratcher for newbies.

I would say DeGrasse Tyson, Brian Cox and Michio Kaku are fairly easy jumping off points, but you'll soon get tired of hearing the same analogies. When that happens, move onto the slightly deeper books of Brian Greene and John Gribbin. Leave authors like Leonard Susskind, Roger Penrose and Max Tegmark until later, they're pretty heavy.

All of the above are pop science/astrophysics books that deal in exciting, puzzling things at the frontier of knowledge. If you're just looking for a grounding in more mundane everyday physics then you can do a lot worse than to take the free math and physics courses over at Khan Academy and then follow them up with the more advanced free ones at The Theoretical Minimum site. If you knuckle down through those you'll be at undergrad level physics by the end of it, which is honestly about as far as you can go with self teaching imo.

I found it useful to learn the history of things too. Understanding how conclusions were drawn makes the crazy-sounding theories much easier to comprehend. Bill Bryson's book "A Short History of Nearly Everything" is a great overview, and you can follow it up with books specific to the different eras of discovery... Recentering the Universe was a good one for the earliest eras of Copernicus and Galileo. James Gleick's Isaac Newton covers the classical mechanics era. Faraday, Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field takes you the next step. Then you can get onto Einstein and relativity, of which there are a million and one choices. Then onto quantum mechanics, of which there are even more choices... :-)

Hope that helps.

Just looked up this misogynistic piece of shit book on Amazon to see what it was all about. Words cannot express how offensive this is, here's the description:

> Chad Eastham will encourage girls to be confident in who they are and Whose they are(J2383 note: it's a christian book, the 'whose' is in reference to God, hence the uppercase W, it's not saying that women are owned by men). Girls need to know that they are treasures to be adored and that how she feels about herself is how guys will treat her.

> Chapter titles add fun and interest to this life-altering message. Guys Like Girls Who . . .

> Wear Jeans (comfortable with who they are and Whose they are)

> Know the Future (understand there is a 96% chance this is not the boy they will marry so don't act like they are)

> Leave Us Alone (have their own hobbies)

> Can Spell (can say "no")

> Eat Tofu (live a healthy lifestyle)

There's a lot of great apologetics out there that make the case for Christianity and the Bible. Don't believe everything you hear. A lot of people try to cast doubt on the Bible as being unreliable but that simply isn't the case.

A book that helped me a lot when I was in high school was "Don't Check Your Brains at the Door". Although like I said there's a ton of stuff out there, you just have to look for it because it's not heavily promoted, even sometimes by churches. Anyway, you're right, you don't have to "just believe". By that logic, any religion is true. There are reasons Christianity and the Bible are true.

For reconciling science and the Bible, I like this organization and here are some more apologetics on the Bible.

Ask questions, seek answers, they're out there. After all, God created the Universe and made us in His image right? So wouldn't studying the Universe, His Creation, point to the Creator? Of course. Wouldn't using the logic and reason that God gave to us point to Him? Of course.

EDIT: It seemed right to try to address some of your questions here rather than simply do a linkstorm. The authors of the NT don't treat the OT as solely symbolic. For example, in Matthew 19 Jesus Christ refers back to Genesis to make the case for marriage. If God Himself thought the OT was reliable, shouldn't we? Plus, the OT has a lot of history in it and archaeology has constantly backed it up. People used to say King David wasn't real, but then they found an inscription from another culture talking about King David of Israel, and there are many other examples I simply can't recall.

I have no idea where you're getting the idea that the Gospels were written so long after Jesus's death, I'm not aware of any scholar that claims this.

C.S. Lewis cautions against claiming Jesus was just a good teacher. Actually, he proposes it is a tactic of the devil to lead people astray. Jesus Christ claimed to be God's son, either He was or He wasn't and if He wasn't then I don't see how any teaching of His is worth following. If He was, then He was far more than just a good teacher.

The Greeks had a pantheon of gods who basically were just magic humans, they were corruptible, fickle, and often cruel. They had multiple legends surrounding them, some contradictory. That's not what you see with Scripture. With the Bible you have a book that tells a cohesive story of God and His plan to redeem humanity even though it was written over thousands of years and by multiple authors.

A lot of great suggestions in this thread!

Something that I haven't seen mentioned yet is that it's really crucial that you talk to your daughter about healthy sexuality at this point. Here's a few books that I quickly found on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/S-E-X-All-You-Need---Know-Progressive-Sexuality/dp/1600940102/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406694544&sr=1-9

http://www.amazon.com/Being-Teen-Everything-Relationships-Identity/dp/0812978617/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406694706&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Teens-Uncensored-Guide-Safety/dp/0981973329/ref=sr_1_15?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406694745&sr=1-15

http://www.amazon.com/Questions-Youd-Never-Your-Parents/dp/1596438681/ref=sr_1_28?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406694780&sr=1-28

http://www.amazon.com/Girls-Guide-Life-Growing-Fabulous/dp/1400315948/ref=sr_1_31?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406694813&sr=1-31

The last one is actually a female-positive book, and the thesis is something along the lines of "guys like girls who like themselves." Most of the book isn't even about what guys like, that's just on the cover to grab the attention of boy-obsessed tweens. The OP obviously didn't even skim the book.

EDIT: Here's an amazon link. If you don't want to click through, here's some of the chapter titles, followed by what the chapter is actually about:

• Wear Jeans (comfortable with who they are and Whose they are)
  
• Know the Future (understand there is a 96% chance this is not the boy they will marry so don't act like they are)
  
• Leave Us Alone (have their own hobbies)
  
• Can Spell (can say "no")
  
• Eat Tofu (live a healthy lifestyle)

The one I read when I was that age was Josh McDowell's Don't Check Your Brains at the Door, which was really accessible and helpful. Easy to grasp and covers most of the difficult questions.

When I was in ninth grade (so five years later?), my school used Living Loud by Norman Geisler, which was helpful in that it also addressed other religions and philosophies.

I mean, keep in mind these'll both be classical or evidential rather than presuppositional, but even having a good apologetic foundation does wonders at that age.

Well, I can't access the source that they cite, and without a definition of "gender confused," it's not really that helpful either way. I would like to point out that acpeds.org recommends Passport to Purity to address sexuality with your teen, which encourages your child to make wise, biblical choices about friendship, http://www.amazon.com/dp/1572296569, has a link to Facts About Youth on their page about sexuality, which has its own page for the health risks of homosexuality, http://factsaboutyouth.com/posts/health-risks-of-the-homosexual-lifestyle/, and claims that if homosexual marriage comes to pass "there will be no brake as our society moves toward an era in which the institution of marriage will become meaningless." http://www.acpeds.org/parents/marriage-matters-2

I'm going to go ahead and say that I suspect your website has a bias.

I recommend Philosophy Rocks by Stephen Law. It uses many clear thought experiments to explain the main areas of philosophy.

Stephen Law's book Philosophy Rocks is for kids. https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Rocks-Stephen-Law/dp/0786816996

I read it with my son when he was 11. It seems designed for kids around 10-12.

I used his Philosophy Gym with 16 year olds and it was great.

I read through this book a couple of times in high school - it's a great intro to apologetics, and it's very simple. Don't Check Your Brains at the Door

The College was founded in 2002 by a group of pediatricians including Joseph Zanga, a past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), as a protest against the AAP's support for adoption by gay couples.

cough

Their consistent cherry-picking of any study that even tangentially supports their anti-gay position while demonising any study that contradicts it, especially any published by the AAP, and their constant promotion on their website of books like http://www.amazon.com/dp/1572296569 that promote faith-based abstinance-only sex ed, kind of gives away they are a bunch of homophobic religious zealots.

This one is great: The New Children's Bible (Colour Books) https://www.amazon.com/dp/1857928385/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_lgcVBb1GMMBGH

Hell Yes!

Unbuilding
City
Underground
Castle
Pyramid
Mill
Cathedral
Mosque

David Macaulay is the MAN. I loved these books when I was a kid love these books!

Partial coloring book, mostly devotional

https://www.amazon.com/Devoted-Life-Creative-Devotional-Journal/dp/1683226879

Here are 3 that I've found:

https://www.heritagebooks.org/products/the-childrens-king-james-bible.html

https://smile.amazon.com/Little-Hands-Story-Carine-MacKenzie/dp/1845504356/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1539024616&sr=1-1

https://smile.amazon.com/New-Childrens-Bible-Colour-Books/dp/1857928385?qid=1539024668&refinements=p_27%3AAnne+de+Vries&s=Books&sr=1-2&text=Anne+de+Vries&ref=sr_1_2