Best Books of 2025

In 2025 I finished reading 48 books.

Best Book

Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, by Megan Basham. Published in 2024, Basham chronicles the efforts of American Evangelical pastors and church influencers leading churches to embrace leftist causes and soften their doctrine. Steeped in money (often) from non-Christian sources, they utilize “toxic empathy” (see the book by the same title, listed below) to transform churches away from Scriptural teaching. Basham carefully details the sad decline of once stalwart evangelical pastors and thinkers.

Notable Mention

Two other books stood out for me this year. David P. Scaer’s The Sermon on the Mount: The Church’s First Statement of the Gospel was a reread for me, as supplemental material for a class I’m teaching at church. I also profited from Patrick Henry Reardon’s 2012 book The Jesus We Missed: The Surprising Truth About the Humanity of Christ. Reardon, an Orthodox priest and scholar, is always worth reading.

Other Books Finished in 2025:

• Sermons for Christmas and Epiphany (St. Augustine)

• Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: Finding the Way to Christ in a Complicated Religious Landscape (Andrew Stephen Damick)

• The Late Show (Michael Connelly)

• Total Power (Vince Flynn and Kyle Mills)

• Changed Into His Likeness: A Biblical Theology of Personal Transformation (J. Gary Millar)

• Demons: What the Bible Really Says about the Powers of Darkness (Michael S. Heiser)

• The Lutheran Difference: An Explanation and Comparison of Christian Beliefs (Edward A. Englebrecht, ed.)

• Broken Signposts: How Christianity Makes Sense of the World (N.T. Wright)

• Wool (Hugh Howey)

• The Bad Weather Friend (Dean Koontz)

• The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims (Rebecca McLaughlin)

• Two Kinds of Truth (Michael Connelly)

• Armored (Mark Greaney)

• An Explanation of the History of the Suffering and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Johann Gerhard)

• What God Has to Say about Our Bodies: How the Gospel Is Good News for Our Physical Selves (Sam Allberry)

• The Spirit of the Liturgy (Joseph Ratzinger)

• The Spirit of the Liturgy (Romano Guardini)

• Demonic Foes (Richard Gallagher)

• Killing Floor (Lee Child)

• Shift (Hugh Howey)

• Relentless (Mark Greaney)

• Dark Sacred Night (Michael Connelly)

• Mike (P.G. Wodehouse)

• Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future (Jean M. Twenge)

• Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI (Ethan Mollick)

• The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)

• Three Treatises on the Divine Images (John of Damascus)

• Just Keep Buying: Proven ways to save money and build your wealth (Nick Maggiulli)

• Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person (Panayiotis Nellas)

• The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (Robert Louis Wilken)

• The Trial (Franz Kafka)

• On Christian Doctrine (Augustine)

• Sierra Six (Mark Greaney)

• Enemy at the Gates (Kyle Mills (Vince Flynn))

• Prelude to Foundation (Isaac Asimov)

• Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ (Rosaria Butterfield)

• Oath of Loyalty (Kyle Mills)

• The Night Fire (Michael Connelly)

• Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion (Allie Beth Stuckey)

• Fair Warning (Michael Connelly)

• Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Anna Lembke)

• The Law of Innocence (Michael Connelly)

• From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life (Arthur C. Brooks)

• Code Red (Kyle Mills)

• Burner (Mark Greaney)

My Interview on the CPH Podcast (Video)

The Concordia Publishing House Podcast interviewed me on my book (Dis)Ordered: Lies about Human Nature and the Truth That Sets Us Free. You can watch below, or listen to the podcast by clicking here.

You can get the book now at the CPH site, or preorder at Amazon in paperback or Kindle.

(DIS)ORDERED Now Available

My book (Dis)Ordered: Lies about Human Nature and the Truth That Sets Us Free is now in stock at Concordia Publishing House. It’s also available to pre-order (paperback or Kindle) at Amazon.

Here’s the opening of the first chapter, entitled “The Authentic Self”:

Underlying the rapid changes in today’s society—particularly the acceptance of homosexual “marriage” and the celebration of transgenderism—is a more fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? Descartes’s famous dictum cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) began a philosophical cascade of rooting man’s identity within his own mind: my cogitation defines me. Our society is in the process of replacing truth with feelings, and unmooring sex from marriage. This is a central cause of the profound instability we all feel in Western culture. It is unlike anything we have experienced in living memory. Today, our society seems to be focusing more on feelings than thoughts. This is resulting in instability in established institutions like marriage and human sexuality.

People are searching for authenticity, but that search is only leading them away from the Author. We are disconnected and discontent, and someone must bear the blame. Into this void, a doctrine of demons is becoming the state religion. The catechists of this religion have doctrines of sin that obscenely reverse the Ten Commandments. At the core of this new religion is the rejection of a God who creates and a mankind who receives life from the One who made them. This chapter will examine how the doctrines of this new religion have developed, and will also set forth man’s true nature, purpose, and destiny.

You can learn more about the book, and download the first chapter for free, by clicking here.