December 28, 2025
The Best Books That Found Me in 2025
St. Augustine famously said: Concerning taste there can be no dispute. So, with no promise that these books will do for you what they did for me, these are the books that spoke to me most deeply this past year.
Within the area of popular spirituality …
- Tomas Halik, The Afternoon of Christianity, The Courage to Change. Halik is one of the major voices in Christian spirituality today, and this book won’t disappoint.
- Serene Jones, Call It Grace – Finding Meaning in a Fractured World. President of Union Theological in New York, Jones gives anautobiographical account of her journey in life and in grace. A worthwhile read.
- Jeffrey Munroe, Reading Buechner, Exploring the Work of a Master Memoirist, Novelist, Theologian, and Preacher. The best introduction to the work of Frederick Buechner that we have. Perhaps my favorite book of the year.
- Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things, Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage. Rohr at his finest. A book that will stretch you in a healthy way. Among his many challenges:
- The saints and mystics who weep before the cross are first of all weeping universal tears for the suffering world.
- In our weakness we deserve tears more than hatred, fixing, or denial.
- The language of a prophet changes from anger at sin to pity over suffering and woundedness. Anger doesn’t allow us to make big switches, tears do.
- Robert Ellsberg, Editor, Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage, The Seventies. Dorothy Day’s letters from the nineteen seventies. Just a very good read.
- Jim Wallis, The False White Gospel, Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy. Jim Wallis is the Dorothy Day of our generation. This book is a strong challenge to take Jesus more seriously, and at times more literally.
- God is personal but never private.
- Who is my neighbor must extend beyond who receives official documentation. Your neighbor, as Jesus defines this, is often outside your comfort zone. Jesus says ‘Love your neighbor as yourself” no exceptions!
- We are dangerously close to expanding ideologies that don’t regard “others” as belonging. Go back to where you came from! The idea that people different from you are not your neighbors and you don’t have to love them, and you have permission to hate them. Excluding and attacking those who are different, rejecting outcasts and the outsiders, puts you at odds with Jesus.
- Joseph F. Kelly, The Origins of Christmas. Kelly, a serious academic, traces out (in a very readable language) how we are to understand the Christmas stories in the Gospels.
- Robert Wicks, The Art of Kindness. I endorsed this book on its cover with these words: “Robert Wicks has a unique, gifted spiritual vocabulary. Very few writers have his ability to weave together the special and the common, the academic and the street, and the depth of spiritual insight with robust common sense.” This book displays all that, complete with a healthy coloring of humor. He opens the book with this quote, when a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower. That’s the umbrella under which he writes his stories.
A couple of academic books …
- William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry. A critical insight into the interplay between our culture and our faith. Cavanaugh argues that we aren’t, as Charles Taylor suggests, disenchanted vis-à-vis the transcendent. Rather we are re-enchanted with other gods. An important academic read.
- Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections – Poetry in an Age of Disenchantment. Spoiler alert, this book is highly academic, immensely dense, and more than six hundred pages, but Taylor is one of the prominent philosophers of our generation and in this book (somewhere jammed among all those pages) are dozens of brilliant insights. For example, on the value of poetry:
- Philosophy cannot afford to ignore poetic insight.
- Poetry can be a way of re-enchanting the world.
- Poetry is the translation of insight into subtler languages.
- And poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility.
Among novels …
- Jane Urquhart, In Winter I get up at night. Sadly, this past year I didn’t read many novels as I was focused on non-fiction. I am kicking myself for that since fiction offers insights that non-fiction doesn’t. This Urquhart novel was the only novel that stood out for me. Set in Saskatchewan, it’s a slow-moving story, but it features Urquhart’s (always) brilliant prose. Read it for its prose, even if the story doesn’t catch your fancy.
And one wildcard …
- Margaret Atwood, A Book of Lives – A Memoir of Sort. This book fits no genre but is, as the Latin phrase goes, sui generis, a species all its own. This is not so much an autobiography as it is Atwood simply reminiscing about her life, from childhood until today. It’s six hundred pages, but once you begin, like an addiction, you just keep turning page after page. Light, insightful, humorous, heavy. Atwood is a great writer.
Happy reading, of these books or others.
Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher, and award-winning author.
He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.
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