At the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, we all have contracted a contagious and incurable condition: we love books. If you’re reading this, you may share this condition. Each year, we practice a kind of disciplined reflection by offering personal recommendations drawn from our reading, listening, researching, interviewing, etc—especially those works that illuminate our mission to seek and live lives worthy of our shared humanity.

These are the books we loved in 2025.

Each title below captures something essential about why we do what we do, perhaps bringing the reader pleasure, joy, imagination, growth, insight, challenge, sometimes rebuke, and much more.

This year (again), we bent the calendar slightly. A known symptom of our condition, we were persuaded to include a few books whose claims on our attention proved stronger than any allegiance to publication dates.

By the way, your condition is quite serious, you’ll be interested in our 2023 picks and our 2024 picks.

May we all never be cured.

Art Is: A Journey into the Light

Written by Makoto Fujimura

Loved by Miroslav Volf

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“We read less these days and care less for books as objects. This is one of the most beautifully designed books I have read—and profound, too. A great artist opens his soul in it and what one encounters is truly beautiful.” — Miroslav Volf

Raising Hare

Written by Chloe Dalton

Loved by Karin Fransen

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“What Dalton gives us is both altogether simple and altogether extraordinary: her attentiveness to a fellow creature, to the place they share, to her responsibility to and for both. Another way of describing this: love of neighbor.”

The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource

Written by Chris Hayes

Loved by Ryan McAnnally-Linz

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“There's no shortage of books addressing the impact of technology on attention. (We've recommended at least one in the past.) Hayes's contribution to the literature is clear, engaging, and nicely nuanced.”

Faith Within Reason

Written by Herbert McCabe

Loved by Matt Croasmun

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“I’ve been thinking so much about the love of God this year. McCabe’s essays in this volume—especially “Doubt is Not Unbelief”—have been really important to me. "Any proposition, any article of faith is only an expression of faith if it is a way of saying that God loves us.” — Matt Croasmun

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

Written by Paul Kingsnorth

Loved by Miroslav Volf

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“This book is a wake-up call to all those who think that the main problems we are facing today are either political or economic in nature. Much more important is the threat that the ‘machine’ presents to our very humanity—in some ways even more important than the ecological crisis.” — Miroslav Volf

Isola

Written by Allegra Goodman

Loved by Macie Bridge

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“Isola is a historical reimagining of the true story of Marguerite de la Rocque, a 16th-century French noblewoman who becomes abandoned on an island off of Canada’s east coast. I loved Goodman’s work here both for its illumination of a heart wrenching, lesser-known woman’s story, and for the spirit with which the book digs its fingers into the rawest ends of human experience. Fair warning: not a read for the faint of heart!”

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

Written by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Loved by Alexa Rollow

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“I will be honest and say that I have not actually finished this book yet, but I love it so far! Kimmerer uses indigenous perspectives to offer alternatives to scarcity-based economic systems. She centers mutuality and reciprocity in her description of exchange, all while using environmental elements as sources of learning.”

Disability Intimacy

Written by Alice Wong

Loved by Alexa Rollow

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“Wong offers a beautiful depiction of relationships across various axes of marginality. In doing so, she integrates bodily difference, caregiving, and community into her conversation on intimacy in its many forms.

More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

Written by Adam Becker

Loved by Ryan McAnnally-Linz

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“A trenchant critique of the ideological underpinnings of the overheated pursuit of artificial general intelligence. Becker refutes techn-optimist arguments, reminds us of the reality and importance of limits, and points towards a more human approach to technological development.”

Living with Grief

Written by Nicholas Wolterstorff

Loved by Miroslav Volf

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“This is Wolterstorff’s sequel to the very raw, deeply insightful, and moving account of the death of his son in Lament for a Son (1989). In it, he reflects on almost 40 years of grief. I have not read anything better on the topic.” — Miroslav Volf

Sin and Theory: Martin Luther’s Doctrine of Sin in Dialogue with Critical Theory

Written by Jonathan D. Torrance

Loved by Matt Croasmun

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“Sin might seem like a theological idea whose day had long since passed, but in Jonathan Torrance's new book, we see both that pathology remains a vital question for contemporary society and that naming and engaging with pathology precisely as sin opens pathways to wholeness otherwise inaccessible. Sin and Theory does what theological writing should do: it draws from the time-honored theological tradition while engaging squarely with the challenges of the present. Torrance brings out from his storeroom new treasures as well as old. Luther suddenly appears as he is: contemporary and urgently relevant.” — Matt Croasmun

Two-Step Devil

Written by Jamie Quatro

Loved by Macie Bridge

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“Quatro’s novel is a thrilling contemporary exploration of God, Satan, and the depths of human suffering and desire, all set on un-presuming Lookout Mountain in the backwoods of Alabama. Besides the relevance and import of the novel’s contents, Quatro’s sentences have a pulse of their own that carried me right through the book.”

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

Written by Laura Spinney

Loved by Ryan McAnnally-Linz

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“For language nerds who aren't linguists (like me). Spinney synthesizes archaelogical and historical scholarship to tell the stories, so far as we can, of the development of the various branches of the Indo-European language family.”

After Stoicism: Last Words of the Last Roman Philosopher

Written by Thomas M. Ward

Loved by Noah Senthil

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This extended meditation on Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy is a prime example of a philosopher using his love of wisdom for the common good. Ward takes the reader on the path to virtue—the same one that Lady Philosophy takes Boethius on while he's awaiting execution—but he keeps a foot in the modern world while taking us back to the final days of the Roman empire. Like the Consolation, it's a book about the desire to be happy, whether you're in paradise or prison, and how that desire leads us to God.

Murriyang: Song of Time

Written by Stan Grant

Loved by Evan Rosa

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“A genre-bending liturgical narrative philosophical poem written to his father, Murriyang: Song of Time is somehow both inextricably particular to its author—journalist and theologian Stan Grant, an Aboriginal Australian and son of Wiradjuri and Gamilaraay people in the Outback of New South Wales—and at the same time universal. This kind of writing is rare. Highly recommend for bringing together the contemplative and the active in us.”

Gendered Violence in Biblical Narrative: The Devouring Metaphor

Written by Esther Brownsmith

Loved by Alexa Rollow

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“This book was an insightful evaluation of women depicted as food in the Bible. Her work integrates contemporary media into her discussion of gender-based violence in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.”

Early High Christology: John Among the New Testament Writers

Edited by Christopher M. Blumhofer, Diane G. Chen, and Joel B. Green

Loved by Miroslav Volf

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“As those of you who have read Ryan’s and my book The Home of God will know, I love the Gospel of John, his high Christology, and his closeness to the pulse of life. So I particularly enjoyed essays in this collection honoring a very fine interpreter of John, Marianne Meye Thompson.” — Miroslav Volf

Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in the Digital Age

Written by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa

Loved by Noah Senthil

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Published on the 40th year anniversary of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), this collection of essays advances Postman's insights by bringing them into conversation with the latest challenges of digital technology. It's a distinctively Christian account that keeps the Church in view, but it's a beneficial read for anyone interested in what screens are doing to us, and where we should go from here.

The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World

Written by Christine Rosen

Loved by Noah Senthil

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Each chapter in this book charts out a different way we're losing the experience of being embodied creatures in a physical world. It's depressing. But she does so in a way that exalts faces and hands, homes and coffee shops, grandparents and babies. It's not quite a constructive vision, but it's something like a manifesto for the goodness of the body.

Friends of God and Slaves of Men: Religion and Slavery, Past and Present

Written by Kevin Bales and Michael Rota

Loved* by Evan Rosa

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Part history, part philosophical ethics, part journalistic narrative activism, Bales and Rota present an incisive analysis of the disgusting ways religious people perpetrate, condone, justify, exploit, benefit from, or just don’t care about the enslavement and sale of human beings. I wish those verbs weren’t present tense, but the horrifying reality of slavery still needs academic and (all the more urgently) activist response. Bales do an amazing job at both.”

*That is, loved the way Bales and Rota engage an absolutely hateful reality that is still with us today.

She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse

Written by Elizabeth A. Johnson

Loved by Matt Croasmun

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the goodness of God and the nature of God as one who cares. Elizabeth Johnson’s classic has been really important, a constant companion this past fall. She’s a committed feminist, a committed Thomist, and an imaginative reader of the whole of the counsel of scripture. The bible is alive with metaphors for how to imagine the mystery of God that we so often marginalize; Johnson helps us recover these and integrate them into our understanding of God.”