Welcome to the roundup of my best books of 2025! A few words of explanation: these books are drawn from the books I read or listened to in 2025. Most of the books I read this year were not published in 2025, but a few were. These books are separate from the hundreds of books and articles that I consulted for research, which is a somewhat different category of reading for me. Most of the books I read for pleasure or edification are history, theology, or current events. As you will gather from the list, my personal reading habits are pretty eclectic.
- John Bacon, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. This book has appeared on Kevin DeYoung and others’ best book lists, and I heartily concur with their commendation. This was the most riveting nonfiction book I read this year. My wife, who is from Michigan, also read it and found it so evocative of the culture of her Midwestern childhood. And Gordon Lightfoot’s unforgettable ode to the Edmund Fitzgerald, which Bacon discusses at length, is part of the soundtrack of my early life.
- Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age. One of the best books I’ve ever read on the Christian view of history. Irving-Stonebraker also writes here about her own conversion to Christianity as an academic historian, a story which alone is worth the price of the book.
- Patrick Schreiner, The Kingdom of God and the Glory of the Cross. This book is by my friend and Midwestern Seminary colleague Patrick Schreiner. My wife’s women’s group at church was studying this short but powerful book, so we just read it together. It traces the theme of the Kingdom of God through Scripture in ways I had not considered before.
- Sean McMeekin, The Russian Revolution: A New History. Russian history has long been fascinating to me. This gripping book gave me a new appreciation for just how unlikely it was that the Leninists could have taken over the Russian government, and just how disastrous it was that they did.
- Matthew Emerson, “He Descended to the Dead”: An Evangelical Theology of Holy Saturday. Maybe the most illuminating book I read this year. Like many Christians, I have always been puzzled by the creedal statements that Jesus descended to hell, or to the dead. Emerson’s book offers great insight into what the creeds mean by this statement, and how the doctrine may fit into evangelical theology of Christ’s death and resurrection.
- John Turner, Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet. This book, by historian and my friend John Turner, is now the definitive biography of the Mormon founder Joseph Smith. Turner is assiduously fair to Smith, but any detached observer would not come away from reading this book believing that Smith was a prophet appointed by God.
- Nadya Williams, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity. Written by another friend, the classicist Nadya Williams, this insightful book shows how the early church’s doctrine of the Imago Dei dramatically challenged the ancient Greco-Roman world’s utilitarian view of human life. Williams shows how the post-Christian West is returning to ethics reminiscent of the ancient world, with grim consequences for the value of mothers and children, in particular.
- Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History. Another Russian history entry, it is easy to see why this definitive book won the Pulitzer Prize. Gulag reminds us again of the craven evil of Soviet Communism, but also reminds us of what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil.” A vast network of bureaucrats and prison guards fulfilled the Stalinist program of liquidating undesirable people while (allegedly) fostering economic progress via the Siberian labor camps.
- Catherine Conybeare, Augustine the African. This book brilliantly evokes Augustine’s North African world, while also giving a trenchant review of Augustine’s major works. Conybeare seems strangely sympathetic to Augustine’s Donatist rivals in Africa, but she leaves no doubt about her enormous admiration for Augustine’s genius, either.
The book links here are part of the Amazon Affiliates program.
