The Best Books I Read in 2025
In 2025, I made it my goal to read 100 books and I am proud that I was able to read 103 book this year. As I do every year, almost, I wanted to put together a list of the best books I read during the year 2025. I both love and hate making lists like this. I love them because they invite reflection, an opportunity to look back and notice what has stayed with me, what has shaped my thinking, prayer, and imagination over the past year. I hate them because lists suggest a kind of finality and precision that simply doesn’t exist. Books don’t arrange themselves neatly in our lives, and rankings change depending on context, season, and mood. So consider this list provisional. The order could shift tomorrow. This is simply the list as it stands according to the mood I was in when I sat down to write it.
1. For Such a Time as This: An Emergency Devotional — Hanna Reichel
This devotional totally surprised me. It is the book that best captured the urgency, anxiety, and moral and theological gravity of the present moment, and it did so with far more theological depth than anything else I read this year. Reichel refuses both despair and false optimism. The writing is pastoral without being sentimental and political without being reactionary. What makes this book stand out is that it does not simply soothe—it summons. It is deeply therapeutic, yes, but only because it is first a call to discipleship. Reichel’s grounding in Barth, their attentiveness to history, and their sober realism about the challenges before us make this a devotional that feels necessary rather than optional.
2. Between Cross and Resurrection — Alan E. Lewis
This book has reshaped my theology more than any other in recent memory. My friend Brach Jennings recommended it to me, and wow! Lewis offers a sweeping Christology and ecclesiology from the vantage point of Holy Saturday—the long-neglected day between cross and resurrection. Rather than treating Holy Saturday as an awkward pause between tragedy and triumph, Lewis insists it is a theologically generative space where God is fully present. The cross is not undone by resurrection, nor is resurrection reduced to a tidy resolution. Written while Lewis himself was dying of cancer, this is theology forged in suffering, marked by honesty, depth, and a hope that refuses sentimentality. It is devastating and breathtaking in equal measure.
3. The Amnesty of Grace — Elsa Tamez
This is a beautiful, lucid, and quietly radical book. Tamez rereads the doctrine of justification through the lens of Latin American liberation theology, insisting that theology must be done from the lived reality of the poor and oppressed. Grace here is not merely a legal declaration or an inward experience—it is God’s liberating act in history. Every doctrinal claim is reexamined from the perspective of those whose lives are shaped by injustice. This book is both gentle and uncompromising, and it subtly but decisively reframed how I think about grace, salvation, and theological method.
4. Systematic Theology, Volume 1: The Doctrine of God — Katherine Sonderegger 
A rich, poetic, and often perplexing meditation on God. I frequently found myself thinking, “Yes… and no,” which may be exactly the space Sonderegger wants readers to inhabit. Beginning with the oneness of God rather than the Trinity, she retrieves classical theism in a way that is neither nostalgic nor dismissive of modern concerns. Her articulation of divine attributes—especially impassibility—is challenging and, at times, unsettling, yet never careless. This is theology that resists systematization even as it unfolds systematically. Devotional, demanding, and deeply doxological, it is a book that works on you slowly and refuses to be rushed. I am excited to read the next volumes!
5. Love Big or Go Home — Phil Wyman
This book surprised me. It is a hidden gem—warm, wise, and deeply grounded in the way of Jesus. Wyman writes with humility and generosity, offering a vision of Christian life that is unflashy and faithful. This is not a book about culture wars or ecclesial strategies; it’s about learning to love in ways that actually resemble Christ. Pastors and theologians will find much here, but so will anyone trying to discern what Christianity means after the word itself has been so badly distorted. I loved this book. I only wish I could have told Phil Wyman how much his words meant to me before he died. His legacy continues in these pages, urging the church to stay light on her feet. You can read my longer review of the book here: https://www.wesleywellis.com/2025/11/book-review-love-big-or-go-home.html
6. Deliver Us From Evil — John Swinton
Swinton offers one of the most theologically serious and morally urgent accounts of evil I’ve read. Evil, for Swinton, is not merely individual wrongdoing but something systemic, spiritual, and institutional—something that can take on a life of its own. His critique of capitalism, nationalism, and moral certainty is bracing, but never detached from pastoral care. Crucially, this is not a book of despair. Resistance to evil is rooted in worship, formation, and hope, especially in the Eucharist. This is a book that unsettles precisely because it is so faithful. You can read my longer review here: https://www.wesleywellis.com/2025/07/book-review-deliver-us-from-evil-by.html
7. The Sermon on the Mount — Eduard Thurneysen
This is my new favorite theological commentary on The Sermon on the Mount. It's not an exegetical commentary. In fact, there are myriad issues with his exegesis and biblical cholarship, but the theology is right on and beautiful. Thurneysen refuses moralistic readings of the Sermon on the Mount. These are not ethical ideals for religious overachievers but gospel—law spoken as promise. Each “thou shalt” is, at its core, a “you will,” grounded in grace and the coming kingdom. This is a Christological reading of the sermon and I think that is the best reading of the sermon. Obedience, for Jesus in Matthew, is always the obedience of disobedient people. This short book is theologically sharp, pastorally sensitive, and a powerful corrective to legalistic readings of Jesus’ most famous teaching.
8. Faithful Futures: Sacred Tools for Engaging Younger Generations — Josh Packard
Packard brings much-needed clarity to conversations about younger generations and faith. Grounded in careful sociological research, this book avoids panic, nostalgia, and easy solutions. Instead, it offers practical tools shaped by sacred listening, belonging, and conversation. What I appreciated most is Packard’s restraint—this is not theology pretending to be sociology or vice versa. Pastors, youth workers, denominational leaders, and parents will find this book both credible and genuinely helpful. You can read my fuller review in the Journal of Youth and Theology.
9. Evangelism in an Age of Despair — Andrew Root
Andrew Root is perhaps my favorite living theologian, and this book did not disappoint. Root argues that our obsession with happiness has left us anxious, lonely, and spiritually malnourished. What we need instead is consolation. Drawing on historical theology and a fictional congregation, Root shows how evangelism emerges not from confidence or certainty, but from attending to sorrow and trusting that Christ meets us there. This is evangelism as presence, patience, and hope.
10. On Being a Christian — Hans Küng
I’m embarrassed it took me this long to read this book. Küng offers an exhaustive yet accessible reexamination of what it means to be Christian, engaging history, doctrine, ethics, and modern skepticism with remarkable clarity. This is not apologetics in the defensive sense, but an invitation to take Jesus seriously in a complex world. Written for believers, doubters, and those somewhere in between, On Being a Christian is a landmark work—ambitious, generous, and deeply Christocentric.
Concluding Reflections
Looking back over these books, I’m struck by how many of them refuse easy answers, tidy resolutions, or cheap hope. Again and again, they locate theology not in mastery or certainty, but in waiting, listening, resisting, and loving. They take suffering seriously without surrendering hope, and they insist that discipleship is formed not by optimism, power, or control, but by grace encountered in the midst of complexity. If these books tell a story about my year of reading, it’s this: theology matters most when it helps us remain faithful—patiently, honestly, and lovingly—in the long middle between cross and resurrection.