John Ehrett, Washington Politico and Civitas Contributor:

Few works have stuck with me more this year than Tomoko Masuzawa’s The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Masuzawa’s volume is a study of how the modern concept of “religion” was not a historical universal but represented an attempt to account for the Western discovery of Buddhism at the dawn of early modernity: Buddhism was a developed metaphysical and philosophical tradition that, unlike Judaism, Islam, or animism, could not readily be “written into” the Christian story or interpreted through Christian lenses. From a Christian vantage, Masuzawa’s argument raises haunting questions: if Christian theologians had handled this problem more deftly, might theology have remained the “queen of the sciences” rather than being shunted into the modern backwaters of “religion”?

For something lighter, I immensely enjoyed James Islington’s The Shadow of What Was Lost (and its two follow-ups). It’s high fantasy in the style of Brandon Sanderson with similarly dense worldbuilding but structured by (implicitly) Presbyterian theological categories. Where Lewis and Tolkien wrote Anglo-Catholic fantasies, this one is decidedly Reformed: if you’ve ever wondered how a novel about predestination can be made utterly compelling, pick this one up.

Brian Moats, CEO of Audio Deacon, VP of Little Word, Content Director at Theopolis: 

This year’s reading took me across adventure, attention, food, dust, desire, and delight. With Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River, I went looking for one brother and found several. Robert Farrar Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb permanently changed how I think about food and meals; I’m now on a mission to linger longer at the table, drink deeper of the wine, and I’m in the process of starting a supper club with friends. Matthew B. Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head was uncannily prophetic, naming our present attention crisis with clarity years before it fully erupted. Joseph Amato’s Dust trained my eyes to notice the small and invisible. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was 900 pages of beauty I wished were 9000, while Jane Austen’s Emma delivered some of the purest literary delight I experienced all year. Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire unsettles human dominance, hinting that plants may be running the show. Richard McGuire’s wordless graphic novel Here compresses millennia into one room and takes twenty minutes to enjoy. Rowan Williams’ Passions of the Soul pressed the seven deadly sins uncomfortably close to home. Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations stunned with its joyful vision of the world, and Joseph Massey’s A New Silence grounded me with the kind of poetic verse that keeps the earth steady beneath your feet. Finally, Born to Run was thrilling and pushed me to run more miles than I ever have before. I’m currently in the middle of my first reading of Lonesome Dove, because I’m a man in my 30s.

Jackson Waters, Sensitive Young Man and Executive Editor: 

I started my year with Evangelical is not Enough, an early 80s polemic which unsurprisingly became a why-Rome-is-home staple of Ignatius Press after the author’s conversion from Anglo-Catholicism. Two things surprised me: one was how much more nuanced and careful Thomas Howard was than his many followers into Rome. He really gets Evangelical Protestantism, and he doesn’t follow the MacIntyre-esque, dime-a-dozen script you see nowadays because it wasn’t written yet. The second thing was how he must renege on most of his criticisms to convert. The book’s “just asking questions” vibe is an illusion. 

My summer brought me Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity, which was the closest experience I’ve ever had to a face-to-face encounter with the Un-man of Perelandra. The greatest balm to its acidic power was A Light on the Hill, Caleb Morell’s 2025 biography of Capitol Hill Baptist Church. It was particularly fascinating because it assumes the local parish is the center of the world. Meta-narratives have wide currency and explanatory power, playing no small part of why people ostensibly convert. Seasoned pastors as well as Freudian psychologists could speak to how often grand narratives lend credibility to what is (in the main) a personal crisis. Might grounded micronarratives of a single place be more compelling and honest to a people who profess the Incarnation every Sunday than a tome or Gibbon-like Substack on why you’re abandoning your tradition? 

Morell’s micronarrative gave me a greater appreciation for Hilaire Belloc’s sweeping How the Reformation Happened (1928), another pre-postliberal criticism of Protestantism (I’m a glutton for punishment). Belloc is fun, and his Marxist/fideist/Christendom interpretation of history has a very based right-wing Protestant feel to it and is certainly out-of-sync with Vatican II and the Curia these days. 

Remy Wilkins, Southern Author and Contributor:

I only care about novels and poetry, and my poetry has been from anthologies, Milton, and Yeats. Since none need reminder to read their Milton and Yeats, I will restrict myself to the Novels. Greenmantle by John Buchan has been lauded by a friend and scholar as the greatest novel ever written. I enjoyed The Thirty-Nine Steps and owed a debt to the sequel which lived up to its hype. I don’t much go in for the stiff-upper-lip business, but the masculine joy and stolid boldness in the face of danger gave Greenmantle far reaching depth. José Saramago terrified me years ago with his bleak novel Blindness such that it has taken me years to return to anything else of his. This summer, however, I came across his La Caverna (“The Cave,” as translated by Margaret Jull Costa), which blends Plato’s allegory with Paul’s metaphor in Romans in the telling of a poor potter’s dealings with The Center. While perhaps insufficiently Pauline, the novel is reflective on art, life, and meaning, and lovely in its telling. Finally, a whim purchase at a book vendor was a surprising tale by Clifford Simak titled Shakespeare’s Planet. A Tri-Personed Ship on a mission to find a habitable world lands on the eponymous planet, sending out a human and the robot Nicodemus to explore its suitability. There they encounter the aptly named alien Carnivore, who is Shakespeare’s best friend. Overabundant in ideas and scientifictional fecundities, I haven’t found such a disorienting and entertaining pulp story since Perelandra.