The Best Books I Read This Year (2025)

Readers know that our own eyes are not enough for us. We all long to see the world and everything in it through the eyes of others. I had the pleasure of seeing through the eyes of many authors this year. These are the best books that I read in 2025. There are 36 selections and I thoroughly enjoyed every last one of them.

My Top 12:

1. Things Unseen / Sinclair Ferguson

Imagine getting the privilege of spending 10 minutes a day, every day, for a year, listening to Sinclair Ferguson talk to you about eternal realities from God’s Word and about the unsearchable riches of grace and glory that’s found in Jesus Christ. That’s what Things Unseen is. Many of us “tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books.” (205) But Things Unseen marries doctrine and devotion beautifully. See for yourself:

“Good news comes to you today from the risen Savior. So whatever your failure has been, come and tell Him all about it. Your failure need not be final because Jesus is risen.” (146-147)

“May these two words be fixed into our hearts: Jehovah-jireh, the Lord will provide. And if we want to be sure that He will, we must look nowhere else than to the cross of Jesus Christ, for there He has proved beyond any doubt that He will provide.” (87-88)

“Faithfulness is just saying an ongoing “amen” to the commitments that we’ve made. God has given us a model of what this means, and we see it perfectly expressed in the life and ministry of the Lord Jesus. The author of Hebrews tells us that, as the Apostle and High Priest of our confession, Jesus was faithful to Him who appointed Him (Heb. 3:2). He was determined to say “amen” in His own life to every aspect of His Father’s covenant promises and covenant commands. Indeed, Paul says that all the promises of God find an answering “Yes” and “Amen” in Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 1:20).” (74-75)

“Peter’s salvation was guaranteed not by what was done in him but by what Jesus did for him. There is a message there for all of us: Our security doesn’t lie in ourselves. It doesn’t even lie in what God has done in us, wonderful though that is. It lies in Jesus and His intercession for us. Remember what Hebrews says: “He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25). Peter was learning a great lesson that we need to learn too. It’s not by our regeneration that we are preserved. It’s not even by our faith that we are preserved, though the power of God that keeps us does work through faith. It’s Christ who saves us- the Christ who died for us, who rose again for us, who is at God’s right hand for us, who makes intercession for us. His very presence before God, the Lion-King who became the Lamb who was slain-that is the intercession we need. Remember that if you’ve stumbled and fallen. Look to Him, and you will live.” (130-131)

Buy it to read in 2026 or just listen to Sinclair read it to you. (Here or here or here). You won’t regret it.

2. Connecting Scripture New Testament (CSB) / Eds. Beale & Gladd

One of the four exegetical rules that I teach my children is “Scripture interprets Scripture.” The best commentary on the Bible is the Bible. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this New Testament study Bible edited by GK Beale and Benjamin Gladd designed to help readers see how the Bible is full of itself. Nearly every page of this New Testament is brimming with color-coded Old Testament quotations, allusions, and parallels. These connections inform how you read, interpret, and understand these passages, and they help you see more clearly how all Scripture points to and culminates in Jesus. (Luke 24:27, 44) The Puritan Thomas Adams put it well:

“This blessed Christ is the sole paragon of our joy, the fountain of life, the foundation of all blessedness. The sum of the whole Bible, prophesied, typified, prefigured, exhibited, demonstrated, to be found in every leaf, almost in every line; the Scriptures being but as it were the swaddling bands of the child Jesus.” (3:224–225)

It appears that the editors are already working on an OT edition of this study Bible but we may have to wait until 2028 to get our hands on it.

3. Essentials of Reformed Systematic Theology / Beeke & Smalley

These authors have given the Christian church a wealth of edifying systematic theology over the past few years: 5,216 pages worth to be precise. But I believe this book might be their greatest achievement. They’ve taken their 4-volume Reformed Systematic Theology series and condensed it into an outstanding one-volume work that is clear, concise, enriching, and affectionate. It’s filled with God’s Word and exquisite quotes from God’s saints. I can’t recommend it more highly. The condensed format works wonderfully to read with others for the purpose of discipling. Here’s a taste on the intercession of our great High Priest:

“Christ’s office as Priest requires Him not only to offer a sacrifice for sins but also to make intercession for His people and to bless them. The intercession of Christ in His state of exaltation is His appearing before God as the representative of His elect people in the covenant of grace. He offers perpetual and authoritative prayer as their Advocate for their salvation to the end.

His intercession displays the efficacy of His sacrifice and the sympathy of His human heart so that His people receive the mercy they need in their trials. As the interceding High Priest, Christ blesses His people with the blessings of the covenant in all saving grace. Believers can find comfort and boldness in this doctrine of Christ’s intercession as they depend on Him to give them grace and access to God.

Christ rose from the dead as the triumphant Priest. He ministers before God for our sake even now in heaven. His intercession is His appearing before God as our representative and obtaining grace for us by His prayers. The sacrifice of Christ is the foundation of our salvation. The intercession of Christ is central to its application. Christ ever lives as the Mediator of the new covenant. All grace comes to us through Him.

The doctrine of Christ’s intercession is one of the most comforting doctrines of the Christian faith. John Owen wrote, “The actual intercession of Christ in heaven is… a principal foundation of the church’s consolation.” Robert Murray M‘Cheyne said, “If I could hear Christ praying for me in the next room, I would not fear a million of enemies. Yet the distance makes no difference; He is praying for me.”

After Christ rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and sat at God’s right hand, He began His intercession as the exalted High Priest. John says that when Christians sin, they have “an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). Paul says, “Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us” (Rom. 8:34). We also read in the epistle to the Hebrews, “He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them” (Heb. 7:25).” (432–433)

Neither in heaven above nor among the creatures on earth below is there anyone who loves us more than Jesus Christ does.

4. The Character of Christ / Jonathan Landry Cruse

The Holy Spirit was the constant companion of the Savior from womb, to tomb, to throne. This superb study by Pastor Cruse explores the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) in the life of Christ. Isaiah prophesied that the Spirit of God would rest upon the Messiah: “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. And his delight shall be in the fear of the LORD.” (Isaiah 11:1–3) Cruse writes:

“This is none other than Jesus Christ. He is the descendant of Jesse and David who bears fruit for God by the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus says regarding his ministry, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor’ (Luke 4:18, quoting Isa. 61:1). Through his Spirit-anointed ministry, Christ is the One who has put an end to all vice and has paved a way for real virtue. Therefore there is really no better way to study these gifts and graces of the Spirit than to study Jesus himself. He is the One who was endowed with the Holy Spirit of God, whose every step was in harmony with that Spirit.” (5-6)

For example, instead of studying the fruit of “peace” in the abstract, Cruse looks at the fruit of peace in the earthly ministry of the One who Himself is our peace:

“There is no getting around it. We will have turmoil in this world. Jesus acknowledges as much Himself. Integral to the Christian faith is opening our hearts to the gift of peace that Christ has given us, so that we would rise above the tribulation in divinely-marked tranquillity. ‘I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.‘ (John 16:33; cf. Col. 3:15). What a Saviour! And what a picture of this Saviour we are given in Mark 4! See Him resting amidst the racket, and nestle yourself right there with Him. Give Him all your cares, worries, and fears. Give your trouble to Him and you will discover Christ to be your calm in the storm. Give a world of worry to the One who has overcome the world.”(55)

Beautiful.

5. Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces / C.S. Lewis

I was introduced to the writings of C.S. Lewis in the sixth grade. I bought my first set of the Narnia books at the DuPont Elementary School book fair and I’m still happily reading Lewis thirty-five years later. For all of his warts and eccentricities, he continues to have a profound influence for good on my life. The debt I owe him is incalculable. I agree with Peter Kreeft’s assessment:

“Lewis produced some first-quality works of literary history, literary criticism, theology, philosophy, autobiography, biblical studies, historical philology, fantasy, science fiction, letters, poems, sermons, formal and informal essays, a historical novel, a spiritual diary, religious allegory, short stories, and children’s novels. C.S. Lewis was not a man: he was a world.” (44)

As I’ve explored the world of Lewis over the years, this delicious out-of-print volume of essays proved difficult for me to find and acquire. It’s nearly 900 pages, with 135 pieces of superb writing, full of wisdom, insight, and joy. It’s like God in the Dock on steroids. For Lewis connoisseurs, what could be better than having essays like “What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?,” “The Weight of Glory,” “Learning in War-Time,” “Bulverism,” “The Inner Ring,” “Meditation in a Toolshed,” “On Stories,” “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” “Priestesses in the Church?,” “First and Second Things,” “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” “Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” “The Conditions of a Just War,” and 122 more, all together in a nice hardcover?

To my publishing friends out there, I beg you: how can we get this volume back into print? “Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.” (449)

6. A Heart Aflame for God / Matthew Bingham

Commenting on Proverbs 4:23, John Flavel wrote in 1668:

“The greatest difficulty in conversion is to win the heart to God; and the greatest difficulty after conversion is to keep the heart with God… This is the great business of a Christian’s life.” (5:423, 425)

How does the Christian strive to guard the heart before God? Matthew Bingham is here to help. He’s written an outstanding book “to explore and commend a distinctively Reformed Protestant vision of Christian growth for twenty-first-century-evangelicals.” (5) To this end, Bingham unpacks what he calls “The Reformation Triangle”: hearing from God (Scripture), reflecting on God (meditation), and responding to God (prayer). If you want to begin 2026 thinking about how you might seek to grow in these spiritual disciplines, A Heart Aflame for God will prove to be food for your weary soul because Bingham will point you to Christ, the lover of your soul. I especially appreciate how Bingham builds his treatment of spiritual growth upon the firm foundation of justification by faith alone in Christ alone (ch. 2). He also does a fine job navigating the reader away from “the problem of an overly cognitivist approach to Christian discipleship” while encouraging “the need to slow down in a sped-up world.” (139)

Bingham concludes the book by sharing the stirring story of the Puritan John Janeway (1633-1657). His biographer described him as follows:

“In the latter part of his life, he lived like a man that was quite weary of the world, and that looked upon himself as a stranger here, and that lived in the constant sight of a better world. He plainly declared himself to be a pilgrim that looked for a better country, for a city that hath foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God.” (336)

Out of a heart full of the love of Christ, Janeway had given himself to Bible intake, meditation, and prayer and this had ‘ripened him for heaven.’ He died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-three. His siblings gathered around him during his final moments on earth and heard him say:

“O the Glory! The unspeakable Glory that I behold! My heart is full: my heart is full. Christ smiles, and I cannot choose but smile.” (336)

Keep the heart with all holy strife for from it flows the streams of life.

7. Daily Doctrine / Kevin DeYoung

Pastor-professor Kevin DeYoung has the gift of lucid brevity. His writings are clear and concise. In Daily Doctrine, he has given us 260 bite-size portions of deep theology, covering a wide range of loci: prolegomena, theology proper, anthropology, covenant theology, Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and eschatology. Here’s one of my favorite entries on the Savior’s incarnation:

“The incarnation refers to the embodiment of God in human form. More specifically, in Christian theology the doctrine of the incarnation affirms that the divine Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, assumed a human nature and came to earth as the God-man Jesus Christ. The Bible describes the incarnation in several different ways: as the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ (2 Tim. 1:10), as Christ emptying himself and taking the form of a servant (Phil. 2:7), as Christ coming into the world with the body prepared for him (Heb. 10:5), and as manifestation of God in the flesh (1 Tim. 3:16).

It is important to underscore that only the Son of God could have become incarnate. The Father could not become incarnate, for he is first in order and cannot be sent by anyone or act as a mediator to the Son or the Spirit. The Father could not take on human flesh and be born of a virgin without becoming a son in an earthly sense, which would undermine his divine Fatherhood. Likewise, the Spirit could not be sent to be born as a man without becoming, as it were, a second Son. We should stress too that the Godhead —the divine essence in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit— did not become incarnate. As Aquinas writes, “It is more proper to say that a divine person assumed a human nature, than to say that the divine nature assumed a human nature.” (Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 3.2.1-2)

It is also critical that we understand what did and did not happen in the incarnation. The incarnation was not a transubstantiation, a transmutation, or a conversion. The incarnation was an assumption. Turretin explains that the communication of the hypostasis (the personal subsistence) of the Logos can be understood in three ways: effectively (the Logos was made in the flesh of another hypostasis), transitively (the Logos transferred his own hypostasis into the flesh), or assumptively (the Logos assumed flesh into the same hypostasis and united it to himself). The third sense, Turretin maintains, is true and orthodox.

In the incarnation, the divine nature did not undergo any essential change. The divine nature remained impassible, omniscient, and immutable. The incarnation was a personal act whereby the person of the Son became incarnate. This is better than saying that the divine nature assumed human flesh. In “becoming man” the second person of the Trinity did not cease to be God. He became what he was not without ceasing to be what he was. That’s what is meant by assuming a human nature rather than being transformed into something new.

To put things somewhat inelegantly, we should think of the divine nature, not the human nature, as the “base” nature. That is to say, a human person did not become divine; a divine person assumed a human nature. Christ is humanized deity, not deified humanity. The divinity, not the humanity, is dominant in Christ’s person.

All of this intricate theology is meant to explain and safeguard the astounding truth of John 1:14: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Shedd’s summary is helpful: “The divine-human person, Jesus Christ, was produced by the union of the divine nature of the Logos with a human nature derived from a human mother.” (Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 617) The Son of God did not begin at the incarnation, but the incarnate personality of Jesus Christ did. There was no God-man until the moment of the incarnation. The second person of the Trinity descended as Logos and ascended as theanthropos.”(174-175)

The liveliest parts of the book are the clickbaity topics:

• Day 63: Creation Days
• Day 77: Transgenderism
• Day 88: Concupiscence
• Day 140: Descent into Hell
• Day 210: Miraculous Gifts
• Day 254: 666
• Day 250: What Will Heaven Be Like?

These chapters reveal the author’s pastoral heart because these are precisely the kind of topics raised by church members. Even if you find yourself disagreeing with DeYoung here or there, you’ll still be edified because you’ll better understand a differing point of view. There’s a wealth of theology here to help us live for God through Christ every day.

8. From Eden to Egypt: A Guided Tour of Genesis / Alex Duke

As a new Christian in high school, I found some parts of Scripture more puzzling than others. I felt like a stranger in a strange land when reading the Pentateuch, the five-fold book that begins our Bible. I’ve learned to love the book of Moses, but I would have given the world to have this guided tour of Genesis back then. Alex Duke has written “a book about Genesis for normal people.” (6) If you like the Bible Talk podcast, you’ll dig this book. If you minister to students, get a dozen copies and read it with them in 2026. This book is faithful and fun; it’s accessible and insightful. You’ll get literary strategies to help you understand the Torah and you’ll get lively illustrations that run the gamut, from professional wrestling to Raiders of the Lost Ark to Steinbeck’s East of Eden. You’ll learn, and you’ll laugh, and you’ll love Jesus more, the One of whom Moses wrote. (John 5:46) Here’s what I mean. Check out these comments on Genesis 22. You go from this, “Quit doing eisegesis, which is just a fancy word for hermeneutical moonwalking, which is a phrase I just made up for when we start with a conclusion and then theatrically reason backward,” (116) to this:

“Abraham’s life was a Rolodex of resurrection. From the moment God called him out of Ur to the moment he shouted his name— “Abraham!” —in Genesis 22:1, God had been demonstrating his resurrection power over and over and over again. That’s why the author of Hebrews can say that Abraham was “as good as dead” (Heb. 11:12). He had no son, yet from him were born descendants “as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore” (Heb. 11:12; cf. Gen. 22:17). What mercy.

Abraham believed Isaac would die and rise again because Abraham himself had already figuratively died and rose again. He had a son! Is one resurrection too hard for the Lord? No, of course not. So why not another one?

When we read through Genesis 22, I hope we can see what Moses and the author of Hebrews saw, what Abraham saw— that nothing is too hard for the Lord. We see a story of a father’s love for his son, a son’s trust in his father, and a promised blessing being passed down from one generation to the next—until it reaches us. What mercy.

Of course, Genesis 22 also points us forward: to the death of the Father’s only Son, Jesus, whom he loved. The connection points are so obvious as to feel allegorical: there’s a loving father, an obedient son who’s walking toward his death with his killing instrument strapped across his back, and a substitutionary ram.

But more subtle and significant than these details is Genesis 22‘s location: Mount Moriah. If you don’t know, Mount Moriah is the location of the temple in Jerusalem (2 Chron. 3:1). The averted sacrifice of Isaac eventually became institutionalized for the people of God in later generations. As they sacrificed on the Temple Mount over and over and over again, Abraham’s history became their history. Abraham’s experience became their experience. They offered sacrifices and gave thanks to God for his continual over-and-over-and-over-again provision.

Jesus’ death puts an end to all this. His precious blood saved his people and decimated any need for a repetitive sacrificial system. There’s no need for the sacrifice of Isaac to be institutionalized for us today because the institution has crumbled– and in its place, there’s Jesus. We don’t need to make any sacrifices to reexperience salvation, we simply need to believe and believe and believe in Jesus’ perfect sacrifice– over and over and over again, day after day after day. In doing so, we prove ourselves to be, just like Isaac, “children of Abraham” (Gal. 3:7, 13-14).” (117-118)

What mercy, indeed. It was a delight to make the long trek from Eden to Egypt with Alex. I’m looking forward to joining him on the next journey in Exodus: from the silence of God to the singing of His people.

NOTE: In the spirit of full disclosure, Alex is a dear friend and I’m one hundred percent biased but everything I wrote above is one hundred percent true.

9. Remember Heaven / Matthew McCullough

Christians are waiting for “the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.” (Titus 2:13) How does this blessed hope of future glory transform our waiting as citizens of heaven (Philippians 3:20) in the mean time? How does the hope of heaven help us to endure through temptations and trials and heartache and chronic pain and loss? In Remember Heaven, instead of speculating on what heaven will be like then, Matt soundly applies the doctrine of heaven to real life now, just as a good shepherd should. He explores how the hope of heaven reframes our dissatisfaction, overcomes our feelings of inadequacy, empowers our battle with sin, relieves our anxiety, makes our suffering meaningful, makes our grief bearable, sets our mission in the church, and makes sense of our longing for more.

I love how Matt frames the world to come in terms of “more” and “no more”:

“At the center of the world to come is the promise that God will be there. Heaven is almost synonymous with God Himself. That’s because all its glory flows from His direct, unmediated presence. The presence of God makes heaven a world of more: more happiness and more holiness, fullness of joy forever, an eternal world of love. And the presence of God makes heaven a world of no more: no more sin, no more sorrow, no more pain, no more death, and no more tears because God will wipe them away and make sure there is no more reason to weep again.” (16)

In one of his many priceless pastoral letters, John Newton wrote:

“The time is short, eternity at the door. We are invited to communion with God. We are called to share in the theme of angels, the songs of heaven, and the wonders of redeeming love are laid open to our view. The Lord Himself is waiting to be gracious, waiting with promises and pardons in His hands.”(148-149)

Take heart, struggling saint. Your pain will not be wasted and your waiting will be worth it. In the mean time, remember heaven.

10. Everything is Never Enough / Bobby Jamieson

Two of Bobby’s books served me greatly this year in helping me to better understand two of my favorite books of the Bible. His book on Hebrews is stupendous. (The Paradox of Sonship: Christology in the Epistle to the Hebrews, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture) And this new book on Ecclesiastes is simply superb. Everything is Never Enough is engaging, honest, insightful, pastoral, and searching. His “three-floor” structure approach is illuminating. Bobby wisely walks us down a surprising path to resilient happiness through one of the most puzzling books in Scripture.

He helps us see more clearly that the questions raised by the Preacher are answered in Jesus Christ.

“‘For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.’ (Ecclesiastes 12:14) There’s no way you pass that test. Every deed. Every secret thing. Not just public acts but private thoughts. Not just audible compliments but silent curses. God’s judgment is not good news for you. It can’t be. Not unless someone has been judged for you. Not unless someone else can guarantee your safe passage through judgment, based not on your merit but theirs.

That is the offer God holds out to you through the saving work of his Son. You can either face final judgment naked and alone, or you can face it clothed in the perfect righteousness of the only one who lived a perfect record and suffered the excruciating penalty due to those who haven’t. As God, Jesus himself is the judge who will pronounce the final sentence upon all prior acts. As man, Jesus lived the only human life that could pass that test, and he endured the execution of God’s verdict against our failures. Jesus is the judge judged in our place. Jesus is your only hope in the face of final judgment, and he is hope enough.

In this good news of what Jesus has achieved, God himself is calling to you. Do you read me? Come back. Repeat. Come back.

Jesus’s incarnation is the rescue mission none of us thought possible. Jesus’s death is the death of sin; Jesus’s resurrection is the death of death. Together, Jesus’s death and resurrection are the death of absurdity and alienation. Jesus’s suffering God’s judgment on the cross is the death of guilt and condemnation for every deed, for every secret thing, for every evil. All this is promised to all who believe and only those who believe.

Everything is never enough, but Jesus is. Jesus is enough to satisfy God’s judgment on your behalf. And Jesus is enough to satisfy your soul forever.

Jesus alone is God’s answer to your life’s absurdity.” (210-211)

11. The Certainty of Faith / Herman Bavinck

In the foreword of this new edition of Bavinck’s classic, Sinclair Ferguson writes: “If, in terms of theological literature, we are living in gold rush days, some of the finest quality gold is mined in Herman Bavinck Hill!” (xix) Bavinck supplies effective medicine of assurance to Christians infected with the “lust for doubt,” the soul-sickness of our age, that has marked both modernity and post-modernity. As always with Bavinck, the canvas of the Christian life is expansive and world-encompassing. And yet, he also tenderly reminds the struggling saint that the weakest Christian in all the world gets the same strong Christ as the strongest Christian who has ever lived.

“Being reconciled with God, Christians are also reconciled with all things. Because they confess the Father of Christ the Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth, they cannot be narrow of heart or restricted in their affections. God Himself, after all, so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16) And this Son did not come to earth to judge the world but that the world might be saved through Him. (John 3:17; John 12:47) In His cross, heaven and earth have been reconciled; (Colossians 1:20) under Him as Head, all things have been united. (Eph. 1:22) According to the counsel of God, all things in history are directed to the redemption of the church as the new humanity, to the redemption of the world in an organic sense, to the new heaven and the new earth. Already now everything is, by right and principle, the church’s, because it is Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. (1 Cor. 3:23) As priests in the temple of the Lord, they are kings over the whole earth. (Rev. 5:10)

Because they are Christians, they are human in the full, true sense. They love the flowers growing at their feet and marvel at the stars sparkling above their heads. They do not despise art, which is a precious gift of God to them, and do not scorn science, which is a gift to them from the Father of lights. (James 1:17) They believe that everything created by God is good, and that nothing is reprehensible if partaken with thankfulness. (1 Tim. 4:4) They labor not for success or wages, but do what their hand finds to do, (Ecclesiastes 9:10) seeing by the light of the commandment but blind to the future. They do good works before they think about them, and bear fruits before knowing it. They are like flowers which spread their sweet fragrance unawares. In a word, they are people of God, perfectly equipped unto every good work. (2 Timothy 3:17) And while for them to live is Christ, to die is gain. (Philippians 1:21)” (101-102)

“Everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world⁠— our faith.” (1 John 5:4)

12. The Story of Grace / Horatius Bonar

I thank the Lord for the many Scotch Presbyterians from centuries past whose tomes line the shelves of my study. Though dead, they still speak. My life would be greatly impoverished without the writings of Boston, Colquhoun, M’Cheyne, and the Marrow Men. The Story of Grace is a delightful theological exposition and exhibition of God’s love for sinners from Genesis 1-3 written by the Scottish divine Horatius Bonar (1808-1889). He shows us glorious grace by showing us the Lord Jesus Christ, who offers His ‘friendly hand’ to lead us to Paradise:

“The man, the sufferer, the conqueror has appeared– the woman’s seed, the second Adam, who is the Lord from heaven. It is this man, this sufferer, this conqueror, that presents Himself to us, ‘full of grace and truth.’ (John 1:14) He has done His work, and asks us to come and share its fruits.

He has conquered; and He asks us to partake of His triumph. To each one of us He holds out the friendly hand, offering to lead us into that Paradise which He has reopened, and which now stands before us with unfolded gates.

It is this man, this sufferer, this conqueror, that God is pointing to, as He in whom it has pleased Him that all fulness of grace should dwell. The story of grace has not only been told in words, but embodied in a person, the person of the God-man, the woman’s seed.

In Him there is represented and contained ‘the manifold grace of God’ (1 Peter 4:10) —the ‘exceeding riches of His grace’ (Ephesians 2:7) It is not words that God has given us; it is far more than this.

It is not abstract truth that He places before us. It is a person, a living person, a man like ourselves, that He sets before us, as the vessel in which all this truth is contained.

He clothes His grace in the loving form of manhood; He makes it to beam forth from a loving countenance; He gives it utterance through a loving voice; He sends it to tell its own story to us in deeds that are without a parallel from the beginning of the world.

It is this God-man, in whom all grace is stored, that invites you to enjoy His blessings. All the day long He stretches out His hands; and His words are ‘Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out.’ (John 6:37)”(97-98)

My Next 12:

13. Theo of Golden / Allen Levi

“Attention,” Simone Weil wrote, “is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Simply and truly and attentively seeing others is an act of lovingkindness. I was reminded of this truth again and again as I read Allen Levi’s wonderful novel, Theo of Golden. Theo is a mysterious stranger who transforms the small town of Golden. “His decision to live small made him larger than life.” (392) What makes Theo so special? It’s his “gift of sight.” (377) Theo loves his neighbors with his lavish generosity of sight. He sees them. That doesn’t sound like much, does it? But Theo would disagree:

“I have a close friend who is an eye doctor and a man of great depth. He holds firmly to the belief that the most important (and formative and effortless) thing a parent can do for a baby is to gaze into his or her face, to hold him or her close and engage the eyes. Could anything be simpler? Is anything more profound? Does anything more deeply change parent and child? I wonder if, like newborn children, we go through our entire lives looking for a face, longing for a particular gaze that calms and fills us, that loves and welcomes us, that recognizes and runs to greet us. Is that perhaps what this day, Christmas, is all about? It is an imponderable thought that the Giver of Faces, the face of heaven itself, the face for which every heart yearns, became a wee babe, misty eyed and helpless, looking Himself for the tender face of His mother on the night of the angels.” (319-320)

All of us long to be seen, to be truly seen, by a bright and welcoming countenance of grace. As I read Theo of Golden, something Annie Dillard said about seeing popped into my mind:

“There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But— and this is the point— who gets excited by a mere penny? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.” (17)

What you see is what you get. There’s wealth all around us. What are you seeing? Who do you see? I lost count of the number of people in my life who asked me this year, “Have you read Theo of Golden yet?” So, it’s my turn to ask: what about you? Have you read Theo of Golden yet? Read it and you’ll be reminded (or perhaps learn for the very first time) that “faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13) (Mom, thank you for sending me a copy!)

14. The Civil War: A Narrative (3 Vols.) / Shelby Foote

For nearly a year and a half, I’ve been neck-deep in Shelby Foote’s epic, three-volume history, The Civil War. I’ve attempted to re-summit this literary peak many times since my first ascent in high school partly because of the goading of my Uncle Kenny who believes Foote hung the moon and that no self-respecting Southern man could make it through life without knowing the difference between the Battle of Chickamauga and the Battle of Shiloh. However, I’ve returned again and again to Foote’s masterpiece mainly because I just love the way he writes.

Well, I finally made it there and back again, from Appomattox to Appomattox. Foote is a great guide, but it’s a long journey: 3,000 pages, 1.65-million words. Twice as long as the King James Bible. The Iliad of the South was penned by a Mississippi Delta boy, an adopted Memphian of Jewish descent, with a Southern accent thicker and sweeter than molasses. Foote wrote the whole thing in longhand with a dip pen. He idolized Faulkner. If you pricked him anywhere, he bled Shakespeare and Proust. Think Gibbon with a drawl. All this to say, Foote’s narrative prose is pitch-perfect:

“In Richmond and in Washington, one hundred miles apart— the same distance as lay between Fairview and Hodgenville, their birthplaces in Kentucky— Davis and Lincoln toiled their long hours, kept their vigils, and sought solutions to problems that were mostly the same but seemed quite different because they saw them in reverse, from opposite directions. All men were to be weighed in this time, and especially these two. At the far ends of the north-south road connecting the two capitals they strained to see and understand each other, peering as if across a darkling plain. Soon now, that hundred miles of Virginia with its glittering rivers and dusty turnpikes, its fields of grain and rolling pastures, the peace of generations soft upon it like the softness in the voices of its people, would be obscured by the swirl and bank of cannon smoke, stitched by the fitful stabs of muzzle flashes, until at last, lurid as the floor of hell itself, it would seem to have been made for war as deliberately as a chessboard was designed for chess. Even the place-names on the map, which now were merely quaint, would take on the sound of crackling flame and distant thunder, the Biblical, Indian, Anglo-Saxon names of hamlets and creeks and crossroads, for the most part unimportant in themselves until the day when the armies came together, as often by accident as on purpose, to give the scattered names a permanence and settle what manner of life the future generations were to lead. The road ran straight, a glory road with split-rail fences like firewood ready stacked for the two armies, and many men would travel it wearing Union blue or Confederate gray. Blood had been shed along it once, and would be shed again; how many times? Neither Lincoln nor Davis knew, but they intended to find out, and soon. The year just past had been in the nature of a prelude, whose close marked only the end of the beginning.”  (1: 251)

It took a novelist like Foote with an encyclopedic knowledge of the War and a limitless arsenal of anecdotes to write this tragedy well. He describes the carnage beautifully and accurately, regaling the story of its warriors and its warfare, from slavery to secession to Sumter to slaughter. Nearly all good history is biography. And Foote paints unforgettable portraits of Lincoln and Lee, of Stonewall and Sherman. At night they come back again and perch around your bed like ghosts. But you also get the gory details of field tactics, artillery positions, calvary advancements, and the gritty eyewitness feel of being present in the conflict. Foote wrote like a man obsessed. He walked a thousand battlegrounds on the same dates the fights were fought in an attempt to accurately describe now what it would have been like then. He told his publisher this writing project would take three years. It took him twenty:

“In response to complaints that it took me five times longer to write the war than the participants took to fight it, I would point out that there were a good many more of them than there was of me.” (3: 1065)

Foote’s description of Lincoln’s assassination is typical of his lyrical style: 

“Then it came, a half-muffled explosion, somewhere between a boom and a thump, loud but by no means so loud as it sounded in the theater, then a boil and bulge of bluish smoke in the presidential box, an exhalation as of brimstone from the curtained mouth, and a man coming out through the bank and swirl of it, white-faced and dark-haired in a black sack suit and riding boots, eyes aglitter, brandishing a knife. He mounted the ledge, presented his back to the rows of people seated below, and let himself down by the handrail for the ten-foot drop to the stage. Falling he turned, and as he did so caught the spur of his right boot in the folds of a flag draped over the lower front of the high box. It ripped but offered enough resistance to bring all the weight of his fall on his left leg, which buckled and pitched him forward onto his hands. He rose, thrust the knife overhead in a broad theatrical gesture, and addressed the outward darkness of the pit. “Sic semper tyrannis,” he said in a voice so low and projected with so little clarity that few recognized the state motto of Virginia or could later agree that he had spoken in Latin. “Revenge for the South!” or “The South is avenged!” some thought they heard him cry, while others said that he simply muttered “Freedom.” In any case he then turned again, hobbled left across the stage past the lone actor standing astonished in its center, and vanished into the wings… Everything was over for Abraham Lincoln but the end. ‘His wound is mortal,’ Leale pronounced. “It is impossible for him to recover.” (3: 980-981)

Foote points out that before the War it was always the United States are. And after the War it was the United States is. The Civil War is ‘the crossover of our being’ as a nation. And what a crossroads it was. There are myriad lessons to learn, both good and bad, from this bloodiest of affairs, when neighbors and brothers, in blue and in gray, gave ‘the last full measure of devotion.’ It was Lincoln who once said:

“Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this trial, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged.”

My study of “the incidents of this trial” has only begun. If you haven’t started the climb yet, I commend Mr. Foote’s trilogy to you. It’s worth all the attention you can give it.

15. Lucky Per / Henrik Pontoppidan

Lucky Per is a masterpiece of modernism, the story of Cain (Genesis 4) writ large in one man’s lifetime of restless wandering and ceaseless striving. Per leaves home, rejects his family’s Christian faith, and seeks to make his mark upon the world. “But his father’s ghost followed him.” (242) Upon hearing the peeling of church bells, Per recalls how even as a boy, “he had hated and feared the sound that chased him everywhere on his forbidden adventures and echoed in his ears like a menacing incantation… [T]hat eternal bell had sounded like an arrogant threat.” (258)

Per finally doesn’t believe in God. But he hates Him.

“He leapt up recklessly and drew a heavy revolver out of its leather holster he was carrying under his coat. Before Jakobe could stop him he had cocked his firearm with this shout: “Now I shoot in the new century!” He sent a shot into the crucifix that hit one side and sent some splinters flying into the air. At that moment, a sigh seemed to go through nature. From the valley, a hollow boom sounded that, while growing quickly louder, was tossed back and forth between the mountain walls like a long-drawn-out infernal thunder. Per turned around. He had become completely pale.” (259)

Having rejected all forms of Christianity, Per continues to curve in on himself, abandoning everyone who has ever loved him. Per is content to be alone, all alone, awaiting only “the stillness of death”:

“The truth was that face-to-face with the empty and soundless universe the mind was seized by the “horror vacui” that the ancients saw behind everything. Anxiety created hallucinations and hallucinations new anxiety, and so it was through all time until God was created and heaven and hell populated.

He climbed, still, some hundred feet and stopped anew to draw his breath. Always, the same frozen waste, the same passionless peace! These huge snow-covered rocks really gave a sense of the powers that had moved them the first night of Creation when Mother Earth was born. And while he was looking at them, he was overcome by a dizzying perception of drawing near to that distant, still-living event. Time seemed to shrink so amazingly at the sight of these stiff clumps of rocks resting in eternal indifference, so naked and untouched, just as they were a few million years when “issuing,” as they say, “from the Creator’s hand.” The Creator? You mean the burning cloud and the dissolving solar system? And behind that? Emptiness! Emptiness! Ice cold-the stillness of death.”(240-241)

How do you answer the question, “Who am I?” As he faced death alone, Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave a different answer than Per:

“Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today, and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine.” (347-348)

O Lord, our hearts are restless until we find our rest in Thee.

16. The Completion of C.S. Lewis / Harry Lee Poe

I loved this wonderful three-volume biography of C.S. Lewis. Poe traces Lewis’s life from adolescence to atheist, from academic to apologist:

• Becoming C.S. Lewis: A Biography of Young Jack Lewis (1898-1918) 
• The Making of C.S. Lewis: From Atheist to Apologist (1918-1945)
• The Completion of C.S. Lewis: From War to Joy (1945-1963)

When Lewis wrote his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy, one of his good friends, Humphrey Havard, said he left out so many important details it would have been better entitled Suppressed by Jack. Poe paints a fuller portrait of Jack, having devoted decades to devouring all-things-Lewis. Many delightful anecdotes make this trilogy appealing even to those who aren’t Lewis aficionados. Here’s one of my favorites:

“C.S. Lewis had an amazing ability to write under the most trying of circumstances. His brother noted how Minto constantly interrupted his writing with little chores at the Kilns. Various of his pupils and friends observed his ability to pick up his pen immediately after an interruption and begin writing again as if nothing had intervened to shake his train of thought.

Alastair Fowler thought that Lewis’s writing ability had to do with the way he composed in his head before he ever began writing. We have observed how he first had developed ideas for books that he did not begin writing until later. Fowler speculated that he could do this because of his remarkable memory, which allowed him to quote long passages or to recall the substance of a page. Fowler told the story of how Lewis challenged Kenneth Tynan:

‘to choose a number from one to forty, for the shelf in Lewis’s library; a number from one to twenty, for the place in this shelf; from one to a hundred, for the page; and from one to twenty-five for the line, which he read aloud. Lewis had then to identify the book and say what the page was about.’

George Watson said that Lewis had the opposite of writer’s block. The words always seemed to flow from his pen. Watson once asked him if he ever found it difficult to write. Lewis replied, sometimes “when I come back in the evening after dinner, I tell myself I am too tired and shouldn’t write anything. But I always do.” (2: 293-294)

Incredible.

Kudos to the Crossway team. The aesthetic and print quality of this set is stunning. These books are beautiful, inside and out.

17. The Black Spider / Jeremias Gotthelf 

If you’re searching for the creepiest 100-page novella from 1842 written by a Swiss pastor, constant reader, look no further. The Black Spider is unforgettable. The writing is highfalutin. The setting is idyllic. The tone is feverish. The plot is panic-inducing. And the lesson is as plain as day: Never, ever, ever make a deal with the Devil. Fair warning: if you’re an arachnophobic, you might want to pass on this one. The cover art is the vibe:

18. The Gales of November / John Bacon

On November 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, a legendary 729-foot ore-carrier ship, sank in 520 feet of water on Lake Superior while carrying 26,000 tons of taconite pellets as 75-MPH winds raised waves at least 25-feet tall. All 29 crew members went down with the ship, losing their lives in the frigid water. Bacon is a compelling researcher who tells the definitive account of this sad story in an unputdownable book that honors the memory of the men who perished and sheds light on the mystery of what happened that fateful storm-wracked day fifty years ago.

One of the benefits of reading is being reminded of one’s own ignorance. Until you know you never really know how much you don’t know. “Our greatest knowledge here is to know that we know nothing.” (3:27) Before reading The Gales of November, I knew jack squat about the Great Lakes and the only thing I knew about the tragic sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald was from that Gordon Lightfoot song. So, I beg your pardon as I air my ignorance and share with y’all a few things I learned from this book.

The Great Lakes are, in fact, great:

“Unlike the Grand Canyon, the majesty of the Great Lakes isn’t immediately apparent. The lakes don’t open before you in a single, sweeping view. Their immensity fully unfolds only for those who navigate their waters. The rest of us are left with statistics, analogies, and comparisons to try to comprehend their enormity. How big are they? In terms of volume, these five lakes—west to east, Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario (Great Lakes schoolchildren learn the acronym HOMES)—hold more than 80 percent of North America’s freshwater, and more than 20 percent of the world’s.

If you could empty the Great Lakes over North and South America, you would flood the land in a foot of standing water. Another perspective: If you stand on any of the Great Lakes’ shores and look across, at most points it’s impossible to see the far shore. This has nothing to do with atmospheric visibility; they’re simply so vast that the earth’s curvature renders the port cities across the water invisible even on the clearest days. When you’re sailing in the middle of Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, or Lake Huron, you cannot see either shore. You might as well be bobbing aimlessly in the middle of an ocean, lost as can be— which must be how many Great Lakes’ victims felt before their boats disappeared.

Collectively, the five lakes cover a surface area equal to that of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maine—the whole of New England—plus the state of New York. Lake Superior alone, the largest and deepest of the Great Lakes, spans 160 miles north to south, and 350 miles east to west, forming an area larger than all of Ireland. From outer space the Great Lakes are North America’s most visible topographical feature.” (7-8)

The bottom of the Great Lakes is part museum and part graveyard:

“Between 1875 and 1975 alone, the Great Lakes claimed at least six thousand ships—some estimates from respected researchers go as high as ten thousand or even twenty-five thousand sunken vessels—plus a minimum of thirty thousand sailors. Even the lowest estimate marks an average of one shipwreck per week, and nearly one casualty a day, every day, for a century. Those freighters battled waves twenty feet or more, faced eighty-mile-per-hour winds, and crashed into lighthouses, ports, piers, bridges, shoals, jagged shores, and each other. They faced fires and explosions onboard, hundreds of tons of ice weighing their ships down, water flooding into their pilothouses and cargo holds, and fog, the one element that could make even the most seasoned mariner stop in his tracks, praying for luck. And luck was the factor they trusted least.” (14-15)

Being on the Great Lakes in a storm is not great:

“The Great Lakes can be more treacherous than the oceans. One reason is the distinct structure and frequency of the Great Lakes’ freshwater waves. In the oceans, salt weighs down the water, squashing the waves and spreading them out, so they typically form larger but smoother swells, similar to a roller coaster. On the Great Lakes there’s no salt to hold down the waves, so they rise more sharply and travel closer together, like jagged mountains of water coming at you in rapid succession. These waves don’t roll; they peak, crest, then crash down on whatever is unlucky enough to lie below them.” (8)

“A cubic yard of water weighs 1,700 pounds, about the same as a large male polar bear. The face of a thirty-foot wave alone weighs almost 20,000 pounds, to say nothing of the force of weight coming right behind it. ‘When that wave is moving at about thirty-six miles per hour,’ Meadows explains, ‘it’s like getting hit by a fully loaded moving truck.’ In a Great Lakes squall, those waves come over your ship every four to eight seconds.” (11-12)

Being on Lake Superior during the storm of the century is horrifying:

“What’s it like being on a ship in thirty-foot waves? Imagine standing in your kitchen at home, and your house suddenly rises thirty feet, then eight seconds later it falls thirty feet—and it keeps going like that for hours. Then it starts rolling back and forth, too, and then tilts to the left in a sickening list. In such conditions all but the most important tasks are suspended. Laundry, maintenance, painting—all postponed. But some jobs become more important, including the engineers’ and oilers’, who must monitor the engine and other equipment more carefully because now it’s all under duress, and more apt to fail at the worst possible time. Despite working on a ship going up and down thirty feet every few seconds, they still had to check the levels and measurements on all their machines, and more frequently, too, to ensure the machines didn’t run dry, burn out, and leave them all stranded in the middle of Lake Superior.” (295)

“The Fitzgerald’s crew was not only seeing twenty-five-footers coming at them throughout the afternoon, which were already ten feet bigger than any waves most of the sailors had seen in their long careers; according to Meadows’s data and the Rayleigh distribution, they would have seen forty-seven-foot waves ten times, fifty-four-foot waves two or three times, and possibly even a sixty-footer or two— the height of a six-story building.” (296-297)

Lightfoot put it hauntingly well:

‘Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay
If they’d put 15 more miles behind her
They might have split up or they might have capsized
They may have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters’

More than thirty lighthouses guide ships along Lake Superior’s treacherous eastern coastline. One near Whitefish Point has been lit for 160 years. Bacon’s book is a beacon, a lighthouse in the storm.

19. An Immense World / Ed Yong

Ed Yong, an acclaimed science journalist, has written a mind-blowing book about the hidden world of animal senses, unseen worlds of smells, tastes, sights, sounds, and electric/magnetic fields. The wonderful word for this sensory bubble is Umwelt.

“Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.” (5)

My favorite chapter covered the Unwelt of man’s best friend. Unlike humans, dogs smell in stereo and they are in a perpetual state of olfactory exploration:

“Take a deep breath, both as demonstration and to gird yourself for some necessary terminology. When you inhale, you create a single airstream that allows you to both smell and breathe. But when a dog sniffs, structures within its nose split that airstream in two. Most of the air heads down into the lungs, but a smaller tributary, which is for smell and smell alone, zooms to the back of the snout. There it enters a labyrinth of thin, bony walls that are plastered with a sticky sheet called the olfactory epithelium. This is where smells are first detected. The epithelium is full of long neurons. One end of each neuron is exposed to the incoming airstream and snags passing odorants using specially shaped proteins called odorant receptors. The other end is plugged directly into a part of the brain called the olfactory bulb. When the odorant receptors successfully grab their targets, the neurons notify the brain, and the dog perceives a smell.

You can breathe out now. Humans share the same basic machinery, but dogs just have more of everything: a more extensive olfactory epithelium, dozens of times more neurons in that epithelium, almost twice as many kinds of olfactory receptors, and a relatively larger olfactory bulb. And their hardware is packed off into a separate compartment, while ours is exposed to the main flow of air through our noses. This difference is crucial. It means that whenever we exhale, we purge the odorants from our noses, causing our experience of smell to strobe and flicker.

Dogs, by contrast, get a smoother experience, because odorants that enter their noses tend to stay there, and are merely replenished by every sniff. The shape of their nostrils adds to this effect. If a dog is sniffing a patch of ground, you might imagine that every exhalation would blow odorants on the surface away from the nose. But that’s not what happens. The next time you look at a dog’s nose, notice that the front-facing holes taper off into side-facing slits. When the animal exhales while sniffing, air exits through those slits and creates rotating vortices that waft fresh odors into the nose. Even when breathing out, a dog is still sucking air in.

In one experiment, an English pointer (who was curiously named Sir Satan) created an uninterrupted inward airstream for 40 seconds, despite exhaling 30 times during that period. With such hardware, it’s no wonder that dog noses are incredibly sensitive. But how sensitive? Scientists have tried to find the thresholds at which dogs can no longer smell certain chemicals, but their answers are all over the place, varying by factors of 10,000 from one experiment to another. Rather than focusing on these dubious statistics, it’s more instructive to look at what dogs can actually do.

In past experiments, they have been able to tell identical twins apart by smell. They could detect a single fingerprint that had been dabbed onto a microscope slide, then left on a rooftop and exposed to the elements for a week. They could work out which direction a person had walked in after smelling just five footsteps. They’ve been trained to detect bombs, drugs, landmines, missing people, bodies, smuggled cash, truffles, invasive weeds, agricultural diseases, low blood sugar, bedbugs, oil pipeline leaks, and tumors. If it has a scent, a dog can be trained to detect it.” (18-20)

Now here comes the convicting part:

“Many dog owners deny their animals the joys of sniffing. To a dog, a simple walk is an odyssey of olfactory exploration. But if an owner doesn’t understand that and instead sees a walk as simply a means of exercise or a route to a destination, then every sniffy act becomes an annoyance. When the dog pauses to examine some invisible trace, it must be hurried along. When the dog sniffs at something the owner’s senses find displeasing, it must be pulled away. Bad dog!” (21-22)

Ouch. I’ll never walk Ripper the same way again.

20. The Correspondent / Virginia Evans

This remarkable debut epistolary novel was the last story I read in 2025. I finished it in one sitting. I laughed out loud and I was moved to tears. The correspondent is Sybil Van Antwerp. She’s a pistol, a real piece of work. Where I’m from, that’s a high compliment. Receiving a letter from Sybil would be quite the treat. Her correspondence is her manner of living:

“Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone? If all of this amounts to you as nothing more than drivel, then you might also consider a simpler value of the written letter, which is, namely, that reaching out in correspondence is really one of the original forms of civility in the world, the preservation of which has to be of some value we cannot yet see.” (45)

21. The Order of Time / Carlo Rovelli 

Time is slippery. We live in time, pass through time, and yet the riddle of time remains an elusive mystery. The Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli has the gift of making the unintelligible intelligible. But in this elegant examination of time, even he admits: “We still don’t know how time actually works.” (2) Studying time is like holding a snowflake in your hands: it melts between your fingers and vanishes. Even so, along the way Rovelli draws insights from physics and philosophy, from Einstein, Aristotle, Newton, Hawking, and others. One mind-blowing passage still lingers with me:

“Let’s begin with a simple fact: time passes faster in the mountains than it does at sea level. The difference is small but can be measured with precision timepieces that can be bought today on the internet for a few thousand dollars. With practice, anyone can witness the slowing down of time. With the timepieces of specialized laboratories, this slowing down of time can be detected between levels just a few centimeters apart: a clock placed on the floor runs a little more slowly than one on a table. It is not just the clocks that slow down: lower down, all processes are slower. Two friends separate, with one of them living in the plains and the other going to live in the mountains. They meet up again years later: the one who has stayed down has lived less, aged less, the mechanism of his cuckoo clock has oscillated fewer times. He has had less time to do things, his plants have grown less, his thoughts have had less time to unfold. Lower down, there is simply less time than at altitude. Is this surprising? Perhaps it is. But this is how the world works. Time passes more slowly in some places, more rapidly in others.” (9-10)

A tone of awestruck wonder pervades Rovelli’s writing. Like his previous book, Seven Brief Lessons in Physics, he seems incapable of explaining the universe without using a tone of worship:

“Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it’s breathtaking.” (80)

How much more deserving of adoration is the Maker of heaven and earth, time’s timeless Author, the great I AM, who inhabits eternity and whose name is holy (Isaiah 57:15), whose “duration is as endless as His essence is boundless, who always was and always will be”? (1:419)

22. Is a River Alive? / Robert Macfarlane

I’ve arrived at a point in my reading life where I buy and read without hesitation anything Robert Macfarlane writes. He’s a master of metaphor who pens sentences as wondrous as pearls. Don’t believe me? Here’s proof:

“To the forty thousand recognized waterbodies in England, Wales and Scotland should be added another 65 million or so- for every human is, of course, a waterbody. Water flows in and through us. Running, we are rivers. Seated, we are pools. Our brains and hearts are three-quarters water, our skin is two-thirds water; even our bones are watery. We were swimmers before we were walkers, slow-turning like breath-divers in the dark flotation tank of the womb.” (16)

Words make worlds and you’re guaranteed to discover a world of new words and old words in a Macfarlane book. Here’s a sampling of the treasure-trove of words I journaled from Is a River Alive?:

• muskeg: A peaty, tussocky bog.
• riparian: The edge or bank of a river.
• oneiric: Dream-like or dreamy.
• fly-ash: The fine ash produced by burning or pulverized coal.
• funambulist: A tightrope walker.
• kintsugi: The Japanese art of repairing broken pottery or ceramic using a gold, silver or platinum lacquer.
• sylvan: Of trees and forests.
• Fata Morgana: A form of superior mirage which causes distant objects to appear to float above their actual position.
• understorey: In a forest, the flowers, bushes, plants and small trees that grow beneath the canopy and above the forest floor.
• undersong: An underlying song or melody or sound; an underlying meaning.

Macfarlane’s books are unforgettable journeys. In Is a River Alive?, he weaves a watery tapestry from a small chalk brook near his home in England, a cloud-forested mountain steam in the airy jungles of Ecuador, a blighted Indian lagoon, and a spectacularly wild Canadian river that feeds a lake that holds a billion liters of water: “It would take a year to drain. It holds a water-year.” (242) The villains are the usual suspects of mining, pollution, and dams. The heroes include environmental activists protecting sacred spots in the rain forests and innovative urban planners who “daylight” streams and rivers, “the practice of un-burying the water courses over which many cities have been built.” (17)

The beginning and the ending of this book will take your breath away:

“We wake early into thick, shifting mist – and a diffuse, lemony sunlight. The river is covert and mysterious. Far above us, the sunlight makes nacre in the alto-cirrus. Far to the west, the sunlight pinks the cloud bellies. We can see none of these, for we are soft-packed in mist and that is the limit of our world. River, rock, forest, mist. A raven, hexing. Invisible to us, a buzzard glides overhead, looks down from its great height, sees that the mist follows the river, is made by the river, and does not hang over the forest, so that from above it seems a white mist-river now winds through that vastness of trees for dozens of miles.

I clamber through brush to a knoll of bedrock by the snowy fields of the rapid that had spun and undone me the evening before. I sit alone for a quarter of an hour, watching the river. My shadow is cast upon the mist and shimmers as a Brocken spectre – until the mist thins and my shadow is cast upon the water, which will not bear it.

We leave an hour after dawn. We have many miles to go before we sleep. There are two portages, several big rapids – and we must pass through the Valley of Eagles. The water in the river’s bays seems solid as zinc. Everything gleams in this light. There is a happiness in me that I cannot control and do not wish to. Sound travels fast and wide over the water.

We float fast, carried by the current, paddles shipped across our laps, our boats spinning whole, slow circles, watching, talking, dreaming. How different the metaphysics of lake- and river-travel are: on the lake, you must effortfully pull the horizon towards yourself, hand over hand, spiral by spiral, and the surprising thing is that this graded, repeated effort works. But on the river, time’s flow bears you along, sweeps you seawards, vessel and host.

Cliffs of rust-black rock start to rise on both banks. We are entering the Valley of Eagles. Bird cries echo off the crags. The river is wide and sleepy. It has, with vast patience, found and ground its way between these cliffs, opening its path to the sea. The valley is monumental. The highest cliffs are eight hundred feet or more. We do not speak much. The mist has fully burned off now, and we revolve in circles of spilled light.” (276-277)

Macfarland’s account of canoeing white-water rapids in Canada is worth the price of the book. “Water can bury you as sure as earth can.” (266) You’ll also learn a little Middle English and Maori too:

“‘Grammar’ is that which orders the relations between things. The word sounds dry, but it hides great powers within itself: in Middle English, ‘grammar’ also meant ‘magic’– a ‘gramarye’ was a book of spells or sorcery. A good grammar of animacy can still re-enchant existence. To imagine that a river is alive causes water to glitter differently. New possibilities of encounter emerge– and loneliness retreats a step or two. You find yourself falling in love outward, to use Robinson Jeffer’s beautiful phrase. In Maori, one might greet someone knew by asking, ‘Ko wai koe?’, which literally translates as ‘Who are your waters?’” (22)

Everyone lives in a watershed. ‘Who are your waters?’ Here’s mine:

23. The Will of the Many / James Islington

James Islington is an Australian fantasy writer. He is also a Reformed Presbyterian. His latest epic is The Will of the Many. We meet Will Telimus, a secretive young man hiding his true identity in the elite academy of the rigidly hierarchical Catenan Republic where power is literally drawn from the obedience (“Will”) of the masses. Islington blends academy intrigue, political fantasy, and a slow-burn mystery about the true nature of power. The Will of the Many is a Bildungsroman mixed with two shots of dark academia with a splash of Hunger Games and a whole lot of Latin. I couldn’t put it down. I’ve almost finished book #2 in the Hierarchy series, The Strength of the Few. It’s ripping too.

24. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies / Yudkowsky & Soares

The thesis of the book is simple and startling:

“If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die.” (7)

If anyone builds it, everyone dies. But what, precisely, is “artificial superintelligence”?

“Today’s AIs still feel shallow, in some deep sense that’s hard to describe. They have limitations, such as an inability to form new long-term memories. These shortcomings have been enough to prevent those AIs from doing substantial scientific research or replacing all that many human jobs. Our concern is for what comes after: machine intelligence that is genuinely smart, smarter than any living human, smarter than humanity collectively. We are concerned about AI that surpasses the human ability to think, and to generalize from experience, and to solve scientific puzzles and invent new technologies, and to plan and strategize and plot, and to reflect on and improve itself. We might call AI like that ‘artificial superintelligence’ (ASI), once it exceeds every human at almost every mental task.” (3-4)

But why would ASI be bad for humans? The authors predict that while ASIs will not hate us, they will have weird, strange, alien preferences that they will pursue to the point of human extinction. Are these guys being alarmist? Maybe. Sometimes it does seem like they conflate “theoretically possible” and “incredibly likely.” Nevertheless, I found the book illuminating and their warning sobering. Technological hubris leads to many devils. C.S. Lewis knew this back in 1945:

“The Hideous Strength holds all this Earth in its fist to squeeze as it wishes. But for their one mistake, there would be no hope left. If of their own evil will they had not broken the frontier and let in the celestial Powers, this would be their moment of victory. Their own strength has betrayed them. They have gone to the gods who would not have come to them, and pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads. Therefore, they will die.” (291)

My Final 12:

25. The Baptist Confession of Faith / Various

The good folks at Broken Wharfe have produced a wonderful leather-bound edition of the Second London Baptist Confession and the Baptist Catechism. I got the green one and I love it.

Of Christ the Mediator (Chapter 8, Paragraph 2):

“The Son of God, the second person in the Holy Trinity, being very and eternal God, the brightness of the Father’s glory, of one substance and equal with Him who made the world, who upholds and governs all things He has made, did, when the fullness of time was complete, take upon Him man’s nature, with all the essential properties and common infirmities of it, (John 1:14; Gal. 4:4) yet without sin; (Rom. 8:3; Heb. 2:14, 16–17; 4:15) being conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit coming down upon her: and the power of the Most High overshadowing her; and so was made of a woman of the tribe of Judah, of the seed of Abraham and David according to the Scriptures; (Matt. 1:22–23) so that two whole, perfect, and distinct natures were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion; which person is very God and very man, yet one Christ, the only mediator between God and man. (Luke 1:27, 31, 35; Rom. 9:5; 1 Tim. 2:5)” (18-19)

26. The Christian Race / J.C. Ryle 

After 60 years of ministry, Bishop Ryle was urged to publish a selection of sermons that set forth the great doctrines and the great duties of the Christian faith. The 24 sermons included in The Christian Race are vintage Ryle: sound, direct, lively, and clear as light. Ryle will help you to keep looking to Jesus.

“Oh, keep your eye steadily fixed on Christ, and you shall go through fire and water and they shall not hurt you.

Are you tempted? Look unto Jesus.

Are you afflicted? Look unto Jesus.

Do all speak evil of you? Look unto Jesus.

Do you feel cold, dull, backsliding? Look unto Jesus.

Never say, ‘I will heal myself and then look unto Jesus, I will get into a good frame and then take comfort in my Beloved.’

It is the very delusion of Satan.

But whether you are weak or strong, in the valley or on the mount, in sickness or in health, in sorrow or in joy, in going out or in coming in, in youth or in age, in richness or in poverty, in life or in death, let this be your motto and your guide— ‘LOOKING UNTO JESUS.‘ (Hebrews 12:2)” (147)

27. Preaching / Michael Reeves

Michael Reeves has written a God-centered book on preaching. Seriously, what else do you need to know? It’s as hot as you might imagine:

“God is the first and primary preacher, the one whose very identity is to make known His life-giving Word. When we preach that Word, we are taking no initiative, but sharing in the life of God: we preach because He first preached to us.” (23)

“Preaching should be expository, but this is not the same as completing an English comprehension exercise. Preachers expose the grammar and logic of their text as a means to the greater goal of exposing the truth and reality that the text conveys. Ultimately, they must speak as God speaks: to hold out Him.”(31-32)

“For the preacher, the application is straightforward: if the desire of the Father, the work of the Spirit, and the purpose of Scripture is to herald Jesus, then so must the faithful preacher. If the Son’s great and eternal goal is to win for Himself a bride, then His heralds must woo for Him.” (48-49)

Listen to this if you want to taste the flavor of the book.

28. King of Kings / James Baird 

Whether you find the current brouhaha surrounding ‘Christian nationalism’ to be appealing or appalling, you should consider reading King of Kings: A Reformed Guide to Christian Government. It’s clearly written and well footnoted. It’s only 85 pages. You can read it in one sitting. Here’s Baird’s argument:

“First Premise: Government must promote the public good.

Second Premise: As the only true religion, Christianity is part of the public good.

Conclusion: Government must promote Christianity as the only true religion.” (22)

You may agree or disagree, you may love it or hate it. But I’m here to tell you: this book is dynamite.

29. The Barn / Wright Thompson 

Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was abducted, tortured, and murdered in a barn in rural Mississippi on August 28, 1955. Wright Thompson grew up in the Delta, and his family’s farm is just twenty-three miles away from that barn.

“This book is my attempt to go beyond what is known and explore the unknown registers of a killing that, when seen clearly, illuminates the true history of our country. The covering up of Till’s murder was not something that was perpetrated by a few bad apples. It couldn’t have been. The erasure was a collective effort, one that continues to this day. This isn’t comfortable history to face. The more I looked at the story of the barn and came to understand the forces that moved everyone involved into the Mississippi Delta in 1955, the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view, never learning the lesson that hate grows stronger and more resistant when it’s pushed underground. There lies the true horror of Emmett Till’s murder and the undeserved gift of his martyrdom. Empathy only lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, and once you know his story, you can’t unknow it. Once you connect all the dots, there’s almost nowhere they don’t lead. Which is why so many have fought literally and figuratively for so long to keep the reality from view.” (11-12)

The past can be buried. But Faulkner was right: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” (73)

This is Emmett Till. His killers were never brought to justice. Well, at least not in this life.

30. Surprise, Kill, Vanish / Annie Jacobsen

Under Title 50 of the U.S. Code (50 U.S.C. § 3093), killing a leader or prominent person at the behest of the president is legal. Who does the killing? Who serves as the president’s hidden hand? Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen provides answers in Surprise, Kill, Vanish. The book’s point is clear from its subtitle: “The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins.” Jacobsen structures the book chronologically in four parts: 1941, 1961, 1981, 2001. Each section details the origin, history, and exploits of the CIA’s Special Activities Division, and more specifically, Ground Branch. This book is really a biography of American covert action.

“Some might say this is a book about assassination, but really it is a book about covert action, Tertia Optio, the president’s third option when the first option, diplomacy, is inadequate and the second, war, is a terrible idea. All covert action is classified, designed to be plausibly denied, and because of this it is sometimes called the president’s hidden hand. The most extreme of all hidden-hand operations involves killing a leader or prominent person, and this book focuses on that act.

Targeted killing is not limited to high-technology drone strikes. The president’s guerrilla warfare corps kills enemies mano a mano, in close-quarters combat when necessary. The group that has the authority to conduct these lethal operations outside a war zone, on the ground, is the CIA’s Special Activities Division.

One of its most lethal components is called Ground Branch. The origins of the Special Activities Division, including its Ground Branch, lie in the CIA’s precursor agency, the Office of Strategic Services, and specifically its Special Operations (SO) Branch, a guerrilla warfare corps whose goal was to kill Nazis—to sabotage and subvert the Third Reich. The motto of one unit, the OSS Jedburghs, was “Surprise, Kill, Vanish.” (3-4)

Jacobsen’s books provoke thoughtful reflection. Whether she’s writing about nuclear war or biological war or hidden war, she forces her readers to wrestle with hard questions: “Is killing a person decreed by the president to be a threat to U.S. national security right or wrong? Moral or immoral? Honorable or dishonorable? I found answers in writing this book. I hope readers find theirs.” (7)

31. The Passage of Power (Years of LBJ #4) / Robert Caro

I’ve slowly but surely made my way through all four volumes of Robert Caro’s magisterial and meticulous biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson. The Passage of Power covers the turbulent years of 1958 to 1964. We get to see the assassination of JFK through the eyes of Vice President Johnson. And we get to see President Johnson, the master of momentum:

“Johnson knew something else. Momentum can be lost. “A measure must be sent to the Hill at exactly the right moment,” he was to explain. “Timing is essential. Momentum is not a mysterious mistress. It is a controllable fact of political life.” The time to catch a wave is at its crest. And while the wave of emotion, of affection and adoration, for the martyred young President would roll on for decades—is still rolling on today, almost half a century after Dallas—its crest, the height of the Kennedy tide, came in the weeks immediately following Dallas, in the weeks of Lyndon Johnson’s transition. By rushing to push through Kennedy’s bills, Johnson caught the crest.

The maneuvers by which he made them begin to move through Congress were made easier—in some cases were only made possible—by that wave of emotion. Had he not caught the tide at its absolute height, he might well have lost some of its force, and as the Senate fight of 1964 was to demonstrate, every ounce of that force would be necessary to pass the civil rights bill. By moving as quickly as he did, Johnson caught a tide, seized a moment, that might not have lasted very long. Caught the tide—and rode the tide, using its force as it rolled forward beyond the transition weeks into the new year of 1964, using it for more than the passage of the civil rights and tax cut bills, or for the yanking of the bit out of Congress’s teeth; using the momentum generated by John Kennedy’s death for other purposes; using it, in fact, for purposes beyond those Kennedy had enunciated, for the passage of long-dreamed-of liberal legislation whose purposes went far beyond any embodied in Kennedy legislation.

Lyndon Johnson used that momentum to launch what he envisioned as (and what, in fact, might have been, had it not been undermined and then destroyed by a war he waged in the jungles of Asia, and by the deceptions he practiced in the name of that war) a vast, revolutionary, transformation of America: a “War on Poverty” that would, in his vision, be the beginning of the transformation of American society into “The Great Society.” His declaration that “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America” was a prelude to the introduction of legislation that would launch the war on dozens of new fronts.

These seven weeks, the seven weeks between November 22 and January 8, were therefore a period in which there took place in the capital of the greatest republic in the western world a remarkable demonstration of the passage of power, immense power—of its passing, in an instant, from one hand to another, and of its wielding by that new hand, in the first weeks after it closed on that power, with history-changing effectiveness.

On one level, the passage was a demonstration of how, in very difficult circumstances (unique circumstances, circumstances for which there existed no precedents to provide guidance), to grasp the reins of a democratic government in a crisis created by the assassination of the head of state and hold the government stable, steady on its course. But this passage was a demonstration of the art of governing on a higher level than reassurance or stability. The higher use Lyndon Johnson made of these seven weeks—the use he made of the crisis: using it, using the transition, as a platform from which to launch a crusade for social justice on a vast new scale—made these weeks not only a dramatic and sorrowful but a pivotal moment in the history of the United States.” (994-995)

Caro began writing this series, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, in 1977, two years before I was born. I’ve now plodded through the 3,500 pages of his delectable prose (4,800 pages if you count The Power Broker!) I’m eagerly awaiting the fifth and final volume of this series. Caro is ninety years old now and reportedly spends most of his days in his Columbus Circle office, writing LBJ #5 by hand.

32. The Strategy of Denial / Bridge Colby 

A few years ago, Michael O’Hanlon stated the following in his book The Art of War in an Age of Peace:

“Many in American strategic circles consider China to be the growing threat and Russia the fading one. That is a strange way to view a nuclear superpower that spans eleven time zones and has a population of 140 million (even if shrinking) as well as world-class traditions in science and engineering- to say nothing of a geostrategic ax to grind.” (81)

If you’re sympathetic to O’Hanlon’s perspective, you might consider reading a counterpoint from Bridge Colby, the U.S. Under Secretary of War for Policy. In The Strategy of Denial, Colby argues that American foreign policy should be focused primarily on China rather than Russia. He presents a comprehensive realist case that preventing China from achieving regional hegemony must be the central aim of U.S. strategy. As the world’s other superpower and the largest, wealthiest near-peer adversary the United States has ever faced, China poses a uniquely consequential challenge. Colby contends that a strategy of denial— centered on forward defense, strengthened Asian alliances, and a more disciplined allocation of U.S. military resources— offers a feasible and stabilizing path to maintaining a favorable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific while reducing the risk of major war. I found Colby’s discussion of what the United States would need to do to deny a Chinese invasion of Taiwan to be the most helpful part of the book.

33. The Sing! Hymnal / Eds. Keith & Kristyn Getty

You don’t have to be a human hymn database like my wife to appreciate the beauty and the bounty of this new hymnal created and edited by the Gettys. The 500 psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, selected for this volume include both ancient and modern classics. It’s a glorious hymnal. You can browse it here. If you don’t yet own a hymnal, consider getting this one.

“Although we ought, at all times, humbly to acknowledge our sins before God; yet ought we chiefly so to do, when we assemble and meet together to render thanks for the great benefits that we have received at His hands, to set forth His most worthy praise, to hear His most holy Word, and to ask those things which are requisite and necessary, as well for the body as the soul.” (1928 BCP)

The Sing! Hymnal sets forth our triune God’s most worthy praise “from life’s first cry to final breath.” What a treasure.

34. The Art Thief / Michael Finkel

Most thieves are motivated by money. Now try to imagine a man stealing $2 billion worth of fine art to simply surround himself with beauty. Stephane Breitwieser did just that. The Art Thief is his story.

“The second room of the couple’s hideaway has more. A wooden altarpiece, a copper plate, an iron alms box, a stained-glass window. Apothecary jars and antique game boards. A medieval knight’s helmet, a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, a bejeweled table clock, an illustrated prayer book from the Middle Ages. All of this is ancillary to the true splendor. The grandest, most valuable items, by far, hang on the walls: oil paintings, primarily from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by masters of the late Renaissance and early Baroque styles, detailed and colorful with movement and life. Portraits, landscapes, seascapes, still lifes, allegories, peasant scenes, pastorals. Exhibited floor to ceiling, left to right, room to room; arranged thematically or geographically or whimsically. The works include dozens of period greats— Cranach, Brueghel, Boucher, Watteau, Goyen, Durer— so many that the rooms seem to swirl with color, amplified by the radiance of ivory, added to the sparkle of silver, multiplied by the glitter of gold. Everything, in total, has been estimated by art journalists to be worth as much as two billion dollars, all stashed in an attic lair in a nondescript house near a hardscrabble town. The young couple has conjured a reality that surpasses most fantasies. They live inside a treasure chest.” (11)

If you find this at all shocking, just wait until you get to the ending. It left me reeling.

35. Pastoral Cautions / Abraham Booth

Paul said to Timothy: “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.” (1 Timothy 4:16) This exhortation ought to perpetually ring in the ears of every pastor. Abraham Booth served as a Baptist pastor in London for 37 years (1769-1806). Pastoral Cautions is a pastoral charge, a series of 11 exhortations, given by Booth at the installation service of Thomas Hopkins on July 13, 1785:

1. Take heed to yourself, then, with regard to the reality of true godliness and the state of religion in your own soul.
2. Take heed to yourself, lest you mistake an increase of gifts for a growth in grace.
3. Take heed that your pastoral office prove not a snare to your soul by lifting you up with pride and self-importance.
4. Take heed to yourself respecting your temper and conduct in general.
5. Take heed, then, and beware of covetousness.
6. Take heed, will venture to add, take heed to your Second-Self in the person of your wife.
7. Take heed to yourself with regard to the diligent improvement of your talents and opportunities in the whole course of your ministry.
8. Take heed to yourself respecting the motives by which you are influenced in all your endeavours to obtain useful knowledge.
9. Take heed to yourself with regard to that success and those discouragements which may attend your ministry.
10. Take heed that you pay an habitual regard to divine influence, as that without which you cannot either enjoy a holy liberty in your work or have any reason to expect success.
11. Take heed, I once more charge you: take heed to yourself.

The Congregationalist minister, John Angell James, also knew a thing or two about issuing an earnest challenge to pastors:

“How can it be expected that tame, spiritless, vapid common-places from the pulpit, sermons coming neither from the head nor the heart, having neither weight of matter, nor grace of manner; neither genius to compensate for the want of taste, nor taste to compensate for the want of genius; and what is still worse, having no unction of evangelical truth, no impress of eternity, no radiance from heaven, no terror from hell; in short, no adaptation to awaken reflection, to produce conviction, or to save the soul; how can it be expected, I say, that such sermons can be useful to accomplish the purposes for which the gospel is to be preached?What chance have such preachers, amidst the tumult, to be heard or felt, or what hold have they upon public attention, amidst the high excitement of the times in which we live? Their hearers too often feel, that listening to their sermons on the Sabbath, after what they have heard or read during the week, is as if they were turning from brilliant gas-light to the dim and smoking spark of tallow and rush.” (194-195)

James said that he read Booth’s charge so frequently he could cite portions of it by heart. He wrote:

“I owe more to that small tract, than perhaps to any book, except the Bible. It is the best manual for pastors, for its size, that I am acquainted with.” (iii)

Pastoral Cautions is convicting, challenging, and bracing. I plan to read it again in 2026. I am very grateful to Quinn Mosier and Baptist Heritage Press for republishing this gem.

36. The Moon Before Morning / W.S. Merwin

I spent the year mesmerized by Merwin. His poems have helped me say thank you. I can say to the Lord, thank You for “the long sunlight and the goodness of time.” (81) Thank You for the “lingering late-afternoon light of autumn.” (17) Thank You for the “ghosts of words.” (66) Thank You for the “beautiful unknowable.” (97) Thank You for “small roads written in sleep in the foothills.” (58) Thank You for “happiness old as water.” (6) Thank You “for friends and long echoes of them.” (118) Speaking of friends, thank you, Scott, for kindly introducing me to Merwin. And thank you to the Fayetteville Public Library for having so many of Merwin’s poetry books.

Coming of Age

It will not be enough
to recall stills from along the way
to glimpse from its hill
the long-gone night pasture
the light on the river
but not the river
the sunbeam on the scuffed stairs
in the soundless house
but not where it was going
the eyes of a dog
watching from beside me
a face in shadow
silent as an old photograph
our meeting our first night
and waking at home together
again
I was there
these same hands and these eyes as they were
when they wondered where it was going
where it had gone
it will not be enough
it will be enough (22)

Now may the God of peace grant you perfect peace, and living hope, and glorious grace, and steadfast love with faith, through Jesus Christ our Lord, until the day breaks and the shadows flee away.

As always, happy reading and Happy New Year!

–Nick Roark

ps. I can’t help myself. Here are twelve more books that I’m planning to devour in 2026 DV. Let me know what you’ve enjoyed this year and what you’re looking forward to reading in the comments.

My Future 12:

1. The Heidelberg Catechism / R. Scott Clark
2. Theoretical-Practical Theology (Vol. 5) / Petrus Van Mastricht
3. Tim Keller on the Christian Life / Matt Smethurst
4. Christian Life / Kelly Kapic
5. Religion & Republic / Miles Smith
6. The Labyrinth of the Spirits / Carlos Ruiz Zafon
7. Mozart: The Reign of Love / Jan Swafford
8. A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement / Anthony Powell
9. London Falling / Patrick Radden Keefe
10. The School of Night / Karl Ove Knausgaard
11. The Son / Philipp Meyer
12. The Faith of Beasts / James S. A. Corey