The Month in Reviews: December 2025
Introduction
Happy New Year 2026! This is the last retrospective post for 2025. Beginning tomorrow, I will post my first review of the new year. And so we’re off on another year of reading. I began the month with a review of a wonderful book on Advent. And I finished it with a review of a book on Classical Christian Education, a growing movement. A few other highlights of the month included the backlist book that was my book of the month, on the idea of covenant epistemology, a posthumously published book of Gordon Fee’s lectures on New Testament theology, a book on how Dallas Willard read the Bible, and a collection of essays on the popular series, The Chosen.
I also reviewed Rick Atkinson’s latest installment on the Revolutionary War and Louise Penny’s latest Gamache, a scarily prescient book. In addition, I read two environment-related books, one on food supply and one on alternatives to the idea of environmental stewardship. There’s lots of other good stuff here, so without further ado, here are the reviews!
The Reviews
Advent: The Season of Hope, (Fullness of Time series), Tish Harrison Warren. IVP Formatio (ISBN: 9781514000182) 2023. Explores how we may wait with hope around the three advents of Christ, offering themes, prayers, and helpful practices. Review
Preaching in a New Key, Mark R. Glanville, IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514010990) 2025. A guide to engaging in Christ-centered expository preaching that is culturally resonant in Post-Christian settings. Review
Am I a Better Christian on Zoloft?, Mark Tabb. Revell (ISBN: 9780800746285) 2025. Mark Tabb asks questions we might hesitate to admit having to other Christians. Review
Brave Companions, David McCullough. Simon & Schuster (ISBN: 9781668003541) 2022 (first published in 1991). Short profiles of exceptional American men and women from biologist Louis Agassiz to writer Harriet Beecher Stowe. Review
The Fate of the Day (The Revolution Trilogy), Rick Atkinson. Crown (ISBN: 9780593799185) 2025. A history of the Revolutionary War covering the period between 1777 and 1780, from Ticonderoga to Charleston. Review
Loving to Know, Esther Lightcap Meek. Cascade Books (ISBN: 9781608999286) 2011. A proposal for covenant epistemology, bridging the subject-object divide with the idea that knowing is a personal, loving act. Review
Experiencing Scripture as a Disciple of Jesus, Dave Ripper. InterVarsity Press | Formatio (ISBN: 9781514013106) 2025. How the approach of Dallas Willard to reading scripture may transform us as disciples. Review
Watching The Chosen, Robert K. Garcia, Paul Gondreau, Patrick Gray, Douglas S. Huffman, editors. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (ISBN: 9780802885463) 2025. Essays exploring the imagination, storytelling, Christology and treatment of persons, especially women, in “The Chosen.” Review
Eating with Jesus, Robert D. Cornwall. Cascade Books (ISBN: 9798385213450) 2025. An argument against restrictions or “fences” around the Lord’s table, welcoming all who will to come and encounter Christ. Review
The Black Wolf (Chief Inspector Gamache, 20), Louise Penny. Minotaur Books (ISBN: 9781250328175) 2025. Having arrested the “Black Wolf” trying to poison Montreal, Gamache realizes this was but a prelude to a greater threat. Review
The Harlequin Tea Set and Other Stories, Agatha Christie. William Morrow (ISBN: 9780062094391) 2012 (first published in 1997). Nine early short stories, including a Poirot and the title story, an encounter with Harley Quin. Review
Equal Rites (Discworld Number 3), Terry Pratchett. Harper (ISBN: 9780063385542) 2024 (first published in 1987). A dying wizard gives Eskarina his staff by mistake and she wants to become a wizard despite no girl ever having been a wizard. Review
Beyond Stewardship: New Approaches to Creation Care, edited by David Paul Warners and Matthew Kuperus Heun. Calvin Press (ISBN: 9781937555382) 2019. Essays exploring alternative ways to define the relationship with the non-human creation beyond stewardship. Review
The Kingdom of God is Among You, Gordon D. Fee and Cherith Fee Nordling, foreword by Craig S. Keener. Cascade Books (ISBN: 9781666732924) 2025. A New Testament theology drawn from lectures emphasizing the kingdom of God as a framework. Review
We Are Eating the Earth, Michael Grunwald. Simon & Schuster (ISBN: 9781982160074) 2025. Summary: The sustainability of our food system, feeding earth’s population, and the impact it has on our climate. Review
Athens and Jerusalem, Gerald Bray. Lexham Press (ISBN: 9781683597728) 2025. An in-depth survey of the parallel histories of philosophical tradition and Christian theology and their interactions. Review
Grieving Wholeheartedly, Audrey Davidheiser. InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9781514010839) 2025. Grieving well can lead to healing and hope as we make space for all our grieving parts to express themselves. Review
You Are Not Your Own, Alan Noble. InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9781514010952) 2025. Challenges the modern understanding of identity as autonomous self-belonging and what it means to belong to Christ. Review
Manitou Canyon (Cork O’Connor, 15), William Kent Krueger. Atria Books (ISBN: 9781476749273) 2017. A man disappears during a camping trip and the grandchildren hire Cork to find him days before Jenny’s wedding. Review
Passing the Torch, Louis Markos. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514011300) 2025. An argument for Classical Christian Education based on its aim to produce virtuous, morally self-regulating citizens. Review
Best Book of the Month
Have you ever had a book that sat on your “to read” stack for several years? Then, when you finally got around to reading it, you wondered “where have you been all my life?” That was the case with Esther Lightcap Meek’s Loving to Know. It’s a book on epistemology. She interacts with a number of profound thinkers and makes an argument that knowing is a personal, loving act. I really wish I’d read this book back in 2011 when it was published, while I was working in collegiate ministry. But I hope to use some of this material in March when I speak to the grad group I helped start!
Quote of the Month
Cherith Fee Nordling edited her father’s, Gordon Fee’s, lectures in New Testament Theology, published after his death. This is a gem. Everything but dry and sterile. It pulses with Fee’s passion for the glory of Christ and the coming of his kingdom. This quote gives a flavor of that:
“I suggest to you that the church could be effective once again in the world. This is the passion that infuses these lectures. If I could somehow communicate, inculcate, and instill one passion into our Christian lives in the present age, it would be to stop being in step with our own age, and to live fully as eschatological people. I’m not here with you merely as an academic exercise but with a desire to recapture the theology of the early church, the eschatological hope of the Spirit given already in Jesus and his kingdom that set the church ablaze. Jesus’ coming set the future in motion. The coming age has dawned. With the early Christians, may we await the consummation of his second coming as active participants in that future even now” (pp. 36-37).
What I’m Reading
In the next day, I’ll finish reading William F. Buckley’s Marco Polo, If You Can, in which his version of James Bond, Blackford Oakes, deliberately lands a U-2 in Russian territory, facing a possible death sentence. I’m also thoroughly enjoying Richard Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice, the second of his Thursday Murder Club mysteries. Ron, Ibrahim, Elizabeth, and Joyce make such a fun team of sleuths!
J.D. Lyonhart’s The Journey of God retells the story of the Bible in six acts. Great for people trying to understand the big picture of what scripture is about, written with wit in contemporary language. Interpreting Jesus is a fascinating essay collection by this distinguished New Testament scholars. He explores questions like the skepticism over Jesus’ miracles and whether women accompanied him during his itinerant ministry. Finally, Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor is a Puritan classic exploring the pastoral calling. It is a bracing call to “walk the talk” and what it means to care for God’s people. He pulls no punches!
In addition to these, I have a whole stack of books that arrived over the holidays that I’m eager to get into. I look forward to our adventures together in books in 2026! By the way, you might enjoy my Bob on Books Best of 2025 and my Bob on Books 2026 Reading Challenge. To another year of exploring the good, the true, and the beautiful in books and life!
The Month in Reviews is my monthly review summary going back to 2014! It’s a great way to browse what I’ve reviewed. The search box on this blog also works well if you are looking for a review of a particular book. Thanks for stopping by.