W. Jackson Watts
Readers of this site as well as my personal Substack site, Churchatopia, will know that my interests tend toward the eclectic. In my 2023 Favorite Books article, I reflected on a range of titles across disciplines and literary genre. This year’s list is no different. With the exception of some special attention to apologetics (in preparation for teaching a course), my 2024 reading took me all over the spectrum. Perhaps I’ll be more disciplined in 2025, but for now, I offer the following reflections on the titles that rose to the surface this year.
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I start with those titles more explicitly theological in nature. I especially enjoyed Jonathan Leeman’s How the Nations Rage: Rethinking Faith and Politics in a Divided Age, Joel Biermann’s Day 7: For Work, Rest, or Play, and Norman Wirzba’s From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World.
This was my second time working through Leeman’s helpful volume on faith and politics—well worth the time in amid an election year. His writing brings sound, Baptist ecclesiology into conversation with an informed view of politics, citizenship, and contemporary culture. As an intermediate-level title, it manages to be readable, careful, and practical.
Biermann, my doctoral dissertation supervisor, impressed me with his book on the Sabbath. He’s a great teacher and writer, but I didn’t expect to find a Lutheran perspective on the Sabbath so appealing and challenging. The book’s breadth, depth, and practicality were a pleasant surprise. You can listen to my conversation with Biermann about his book here.
Finally, Norman Wirzba’s book on creation was a brief, but dense meditation on the challenges that modernity poses to a robust, biblical view of creation. Wirzba—a preeminent agrarian theologian (and my former thesis advisor)—is well positioned to present this treatment. Where Free Will Baptists disagree with Wirzba (and there are places for that) they will also find places to rejoice in such a penetrating analysis of what happens when God’s creation is reduced to something to be consumed rather than stewarded.
Yet my favorite book in the more conventional “theological arena” would be Christianity: The True Humanism, co-authored by the late J.I. Packer and Thomas Howard. How could I have ever missed the existence of this book!? Published in the mid-1980s, Packer and Howard do the church a great service when it comes to explaining how the Bible gives rise to an authentic humanity. Simultaneously, their book manages to be a book on spirituality, cultural discipleship, and anthropology. I couldn’t commend it more.
As to books in the broader Christian ministry area, my thoughts go to three titles: David Mathis’s Workers for Your Joy: The Call of Christ on Christian Leaders, Ray Ortlund’s The Death of Porn: Men of Integrity Building a World of Nobility, and Joshua Chatraw and Mark Allen’s Apologetics at the Cross: An Introduction for Christian Witness.
Mathis uses the pastoral qualifications of the New Testament as the basis of his work. Yet his work is far more than a barebones exegesis of the relevant passages. It offers exposition, illustration, and exhortation. Mathis sounds the notes that aspiring and current church leaders need to hear. For good reason, this work received a 2022 Award of Distinction from Crossway Books.
Ortlund’s book, also a delight from Crossway, came to me under random circumstances. As they tend to do periodically, the publisher gave away thousands of free copies. However, once I received it, it sat idly on my shelf for at least two years. Shame on me! Out of curiosity, I finally pulled it down and read it. What a balm for men at all stages of discipleship! This will be a go-to title not only for ministering to men struggling with pornography, but men simply trying to better understand the gospel and sin.
Finally, I heartily commend Chatraw and Allen’s work on apologetics. I join one of the reviewers in saying that I have become wary of apologetics books (for reasons I won’t elaborate on here). However, they accomplish something in this volume I hadn’t previously seen. They manage to provide a biblical, historical, and methodological survey, cultural analysis, and then their own distinctly cross-centered approach to apologetics. I will continue to point to this work as one of the most useful apologetics books available today.
Three books especially moved me in 2024: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Daniel Silliman’s One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation, and Richard Lischer’s Open Secrets: A Memoir of Faith and Discovery.
What more can I say of Robinson’s work, a Pulitzer Prize winner, that hasn’t already been said? I confess: it struck me as rather slow. However, I think that is precisely how it was meant to be read: slowly. Still, in my haste, I found more than one paragraph or sentence to cause me to reconsider my frenetic life in the world—and my all-too-distracted life in the Lord.
Silliman’s biography of Nixon (which I have written about elsewhere) moved in a rather different way: it broke my heart. It recounts Nixon’s spiritual/religious journey and how that journey was shaped by and refracted through his political journey. Silliman unearths insights about Nixon I’ve never encountered in previous Nixon literature—an impressive feat in its own right. But I warn readers: this book will leave you deeply troubled.
I always enjoy a good pastoral-theological memoir, and Lischer’s work fit the bill. One of his former doctoral students told me about it, and I knew it was for me. Ironically, Lischer’s journey took him right through the very region in which I presently serve. The book is mostly an exploration of his first pastorate in rural Illinois. It’s raw, humorous, and provocative. It reminded me of the same kind of misguided thinking that has occasionally accompanied my own ministry. Despite Lischer’s Lutheranism, I suspect most pastors will find many familiar themes.
Finally, I conclude with seven books belonging to decidedly non-theological areas.
Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter was the novel I could barely put down. Now a series on Apple TV+ (which I haven’t seen), Crouch invites readers into a literary journey into the multiverse. Lest I spoil anything, I’ll stop there.
David Grann’s historical tale, The Wager, was another book I found difficult to put down. The seafaring ways of Europeans in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries has been a regular fascination of mine. How did they do it? Why did they do it? And why would anyone in their right mind think such voyages would be successful? You have to read this book to believe that such a story actually happened.
Speaking of the ocean, one of my top three favorite books was Christina Thompson’s Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia. How in the world did people come to inhabit these tiny little islands all throughout the Pacific? How has the conventional narrative evolved concerning the settlement of these isolated places? Thompson offers lovers of history and geography a four-course meal.
Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation has been one of the most discussed books of 2024—and for good reason. The subtitle says it all: “How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” Haidt, a social psychologist, has exposed the great harms inflicted upon children by a two-fold problem: early exposure to smartphones with social media, and too little free play and responsibility in the world. Every parent, youth leader, and person with responsibility for school-age children should read this carefully.
As I presently write this post, I am still working through three titles that have enlightened me about cultural developments and political history.
James Davison Hunter, one of my favorite authors, has published Democracy and Solidarity. When we look back over 2024 in five or ten years, I feel strongly that we will say it was one of the two or three most consequential books of the year. (That’s what several of Hunter’s books have accomplished over the years.) Hunter seeks to help us understand what has happened within the American experiment to erode our sense of solidarity. (Note he doesn’t use abstract terms like “unity” or “community.”)
The sociologist Harmut Rosa penned a short but dense book, The Uncontrollability of the World. Rosa wants us to see our contemporary world through the lens of uncontrollability—which suggests that modernity is fundamentally about an effort to make the world controllable. Ironically, it is only in encountering the world as uncontrollable (which it in fact is) that we are truly moved, touched, and made to feel alive.
Finally, another good presidential biography rounds off the list. Besides Donald Trump, only one other president has been elected to two, non-consecutive terms. That distinction belongs to Grover Cleveland. Troy Senik’s treatment—A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland—is an accessible, fast-moving look at one of the more understudied presidents. Cleveland’s political accomplishments are at once surprising, unprecedented, little-known, and uneven. Nevertheless, he managed to win the presidency twice, and popular vote three consecutive times!
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I’ve said it many times before: theology and theologians benefit from an assorted literary diet. That said, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Everyone benefits from some kind of reading list, but inevitably, some of us will be pulled away from our lists by opportunity, interests, recommendations, and even the search for some good anecdotes.
However, in short, I’d say my favorite books this year were Christianity: The True Humanism, followed by How the Nations Rage, and The Puzzle of Polynesia.