My Favorite Books of 2025

The Russell Moore Show

Russell Moore

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality

4.7 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Russell shares his favorite reads of the year, an annual tradition on the Russell Moore Show. Watch the video of this episode on YouTube here. You can read a version of this list from the newsletter here. Russell’s top ten books (in alphabetical order by author): Leslie Baynes, Between Interpretation and Imagination: C. S. Lewis and the Bible (Eerdmans) Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story (Counterpoint) Nicholas Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart (Norton) Catherine Conybeare, Augustine the African (Norton) Stephen King and Maurice Sendak, Hansel and Gretel (HarperCollins) Ian McEwan, What We Can Know: A Novel (Knopf) Daniel Nayeri, The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story (Levine Querido) Adam Plunkett, Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Jonathan Rauch, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy (Yale University Press) Graham Tomlin, Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern World (Hodder & Stoughton) Keep up with Russell: Sign up for the weekly newsletter where Russell shares thoughtful takes on big questions, offers a Christian perspective on life, and recommends books and music he's enjoying. Submit a question for the show at questions@russellmoore.com Subscribe to the Christianity Today Magazine: Special offer for listeners of The Russell Moore Show: Click here for 25% off a subscription Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, this Russell Moore. This Christmas, did you know there's a way that you can support this podcast
0:04.7	and help Christianity today to equip more believers to live faithfully in this crazy, divided world?
0:12.3	Join us by sending your year-end gift to strengthen and empower the church to flourish.
0:17.5	Visit more ct.com slash flourish. That's more with one o ct.com slash flourish.
0:28.9	You're listening to the Russell Moore Show where we look for signposts in a strange time
0:33.7	by standing fast to what really matters. Kingdom over culture wars, truth over tribalism,
0:40.5	pilgrimage over partisanship, sanity over cynicism, witness over winning, and Christ over everything.
0:47.0	Today we have a conversation to do just that.
1:01.2	Hey everybody, this is Russell Moore. Every year, as soon as I start to hear in the grocery store,
1:07.6	Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You coming on replacing Monster Mash on the sound system. I know it's time to start getting together my favorite books of the year.
1:12.0	And every time that that happens, and it gets earlier and earlier, it's right after Halloween now.
1:18.5	But every year, I try to assemble 10 books. I try to keep some rules for myself that we'll talk about later that I usually break.
1:29.0	And it is inevitable that sometime after the new year, I'm going to say, oh, I forgot about
1:35.9	that one and wish that I had included it, but it will be too late.
1:40.9	So I want to go through and just tell you why I liked each of these books. If you're
1:45.8	watching on YouTube, I'll hold them up and show you what the book looks like. And if you're not,
1:51.1	you can just imagine as you're listening to it. So we're going to go through the books that
1:57.2	really made me think or laugh or just get absorbed in them this wild year.
2:05.9	And I'm going to list them in alphabetical order by the author, not in terms of, well, here's
2:10.5	the best book or a countdown for worst of best. That's not what's happening here. This is just
2:16.3	an alphabetical arrangement of these books.
2:19.4	So let's start with Leslie Bain's book between interpretation and imagination, C.S. Lewis and the
	...

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