My favorite books of 2025

He now admits it was the “dumb­est thing” he ever wrote.

Writing for The Atlantic in 2003, Jonathan Rauch of Brookings Institution, who describes him­self as an “athe­is­tic, homo­sex­u­al Jew,” cel­e­brat­ed apathe­ism, which he defined as not car­ing one way or the oth­er about reli­gion. He gloat­ed that America’s grow­ing indif­fer­ence to Christianity was “the prod­uct of a deter­mined cul­tur­al effort to dis­ci­pline the reli­gious mind­set,” and he pre­dict­ed it would reduce divi­sive­ness in society. 

But that isn’t what hap­pened. As America became less Christian, left and right import­ed reli­gious zeal into sec­u­lar pol­i­tics and export­ed pol­i­tics into reli­gion, mak­ing the coun­try more divid­ed than it has been since the Civil War.

In his new book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, the author wrote: “I came to real­ize that in American civic life, Christianity is a load-bear­ing wall. When it buck­les, all the insti­tu­tions around it come under stress, and some of them buck­le, too.”

Rauch says the “pecu­liar doc­trines” of Christianity are what the coun­try needs now. He suc­cinct­ly describes three core beliefs of Christianity as: don’t be afraid, for­give each oth­er, and be like Jesus. These val­ues, he says, mir­ror those of lib­er­al democ­ra­cy: don’t play on people’s fears and prej­u­dices; prac­tice for­bear­ance, civil­i­ty, and com­pro­mise; and pay par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to those Jesus called “the least of these” — the poor, the unin­sured, the refugees. 

He makes the argu­ment that although church and state should not be for­mal­ly allied, they should be “rea­son­ably aligned.”

Rauch is crit­i­cal of lib­er­al “thin Christianity,” which is influ­enced by sec­u­lar cul­ture but no longer forms the val­ues of that cul­ture, and of right­ist “sharp Christianity,” which is divi­sive, fear­ful, par­ti­san, and “un-Christlike.” What he wants to see more of is “thick Christianity,” which is root­ed in the deep­est tra­di­tions and teach­ings of Jesus. In a recent pod­cast with evan­gel­i­cal leader Curtis Chang, Rauch says he doesn’t want Christians to be more pro­gres­sive or more con­ser­v­a­tive; he wants them to be more Christian. 

This is not a new idea. He cites Thomas Jefferson, a reli­gious skep­tic like him­self, who believed that Christianity teach­es virtue, which makes America more gov­ern­able— a belief Jefferson shared with his friend and some­time adver­sary, John Adams, who was a Christian.

“America’s demon­stra­tion that a coun­try can be both devout and diverse, sec­u­lar and spir­i­tu­al, has been a his­toric achieve­ment and a gift to the world,” Rauch wrote.

In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Ross Douthat, a Catholic and con­ser­v­a­tive colum­nist for The New York Times, who writes about spir­i­tu­al sub­jects for a skep­ti­cal audi­ence, shows that reli­gious belief makes sense of the uni­verse and our place in it, explores the mys­tery of con­scious­ness, and explains super­nat­ur­al encoun­ters. He argues that, with what we know today, it is hard­er not to have faith than to have it.

Ernest Hemingway’s first book of short sto­ries, In Our Time, was pub­lished in 1925, but its best sto­ry, Big Two-Hearted River, has been re-released as a beau­ti­ful, hard­cov­er cen­ten­ni­al edi­tion. It is a sim­ple sto­ry of a vet­er­an home from the Great War who goes fly fish­ing in a place he knows well. It is one of the best ear­ly exam­ples of the master’s style: taut writ­ing that best demon­strates the adage for writ­ers: show, don’t tell.

Another new work of fic­tion I enjoyed was So Far Gone, by Jess Walter. It is a mad­cap adven­ture about a retired news­pa­per reporter who punch­es his dim-wit­ted son-in-law dur­ing a Thanksgiving Day argu­ment he tried hard to avoid, then los­es his smart­phone and goes to live off the grid in a cab­in in the woods—until he learns that a Christian nation­al­ist mili­tia has kid­naped his grand­chil­dren and it’s up to him and some unlike­ly allies to res­cue them.

I’m fas­ci­nat­ed with his­to­ry, so one of the books I antic­i­pat­ed this year was a slim vol­ume about the dis­ci­pline itself, which I received as a birth­day present days after its autumn pub­li­ca­tion. In History Matters, the late David McCullough shares his thoughts on how his­to­ry informs the present and future in a series of his essays edit­ed by his daugh­ter, Dorie McCullough Lawson, and his long­time researcher, Michael Hill. It’s a good intro­duc­tion to his work.

By far my favorite his­to­ry book of 2025 was Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America, by Scott Ellsworth. What fas­ci­nat­ed me most was that it shat­ters the myth that John Wilkes Booth was a lone assas­sin and shows that he con­spired with the Confederate Secret Service to kill Lincoln and try to over­throw the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. In the after­ward, Ellsworth exam­ines the Lost Cause and the white­wash­ing of his­to­ry, and draws par­al­lels to the uncer­tain time in which we live.

“We’ve been there before,” he writes.

Here is a list of books I read in 2025.

• The Name of This Band is R.E.M. – Peter Ames Carlin
• Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy – Margaret Sullivan
• This is Water: Some Thoughts on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life – David Foster Wallace
• Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious – Ross Douthat
• Defiant Hope: Essays on Life, Faith, and Freedom – Michael Gerson
• Harbingers: What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal about Rising Threats to American Democracy –Timothy J. Heaphy
• Big Two-Hearted River (cen­ten­ni­al edi­tion, with for­ward by John N. Maclean, illus­trat­ed by Chris Wormell) – Ernest Hemingway
• How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith – Mariann Edgar Budde
• The Things They Carried – Tim O’ Brien
• America – Jean Baudrillard
• John Marshall: The Chief Justice Who Saved the Nation – Giles Harlow Unger
• Henry Clay: America’s Greatest Statesman – Giles Harlow Unger
• Boonesborough Unearthed: Frontier Archaeology at a Revolutionary Fort – Nancy O’Malley
• Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-wing Extremism – Jeffrey Toobin 
• So Far Gone – Jess Walter
• How Democracies Die – Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
• The Project: How Project 2025 is Reshaping America – David A. Graham
• Train Dreams – Denis Johnson
• 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America – Josh Dawsey, Tyler Page and Isaac Arnsdorf
• An American Dreamer: Life in a Divided Country – David Finkel
• White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy – Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman
• Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America – Scott Ellsworth
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Brief Life – Renate Bethge
• History Matters – David McCullough
• Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon – Larry Tye
• Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy – Jonathan Rauch
• Here is New York – E.B. White
• The Living Mountain – Nan Shepherd
• Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
• Lessons from Bobby: Ten Reasons Robert F. Kennedy Still Matters – Chris Matthews
• Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis
• Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as Dissident Disciples – Scot McKnight with Cody Matchett
• Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life – Margaret Sullivan
• Small Things Like These – Claire Keegan
• The War for Middle Earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945 – Joseph Loconte