My Top Ten Books for 2024
One day into the new year, here are my Top 10 Books for 2024.
I often like to read sermons in my devotional life and Fleming Rutledge’s collection, Help My Unbelief, companioned me well this past year. With titles like “A Response to Dr. Freud” and “God-damned Christians,” Rutledge’s book is a gift especially to those who are clinging to their faith…for God’s sake.
Ben Macintyre’s nonfiction book, The Spy and the Traitor, was utterly engrossing. It’s like one of John le Carré’s novels come to life—but better, because truth is always stranger than fiction.
I like to read books on the vocation of a theologian as a way to remind myself why I do what I do. Malcolm Guite’s slim but wise book, The Word within the Words, not only offers insight into Guite’s own sense of his vocation but also serves as a profound encouragement to all of us who teach others about God.
If you’ve ever wondered whether an author can show you what music truly sounds like on the written page, Japanese author Riku Onda’s novel, Honeybees and Distant Thunder, accomplishes that seemingly impossible feat. It’s a piano competition meets friendship meets the passions and fears of an artist’s life.
In this joint effort by Charlie (Peacock) and Andi Ashworth, Why Everything That Doesn’t Matter, Matters So Much represents hard-won insights on life, faith, and why it’s so painful to be truly human in this broken world of ours. It’s such a good book.
With Gerard Manley Hopkins as the primary conversation partner in the first chapter of my book with Brazos Press on the vocation of artists, Catherine Randall’s biography, A Heart Lost in Wonder, helped me get a sense of Hopkins’ twin vocation as poet-priest, along with the thrilling joys and acute sorrows that accompanied his life.
It’s astonishing how one culture can apparently dominate all cultures, but that’s precisely what’s happened with the uniquely Korean culture of beauty according to Elise Hu in her book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital.
If you ever wondered what it took to build a Gothic cathedral, Ken Follett’s enthralling and deliciously entertaining novel, Pillars of the Earth, shows you in dramatic detail.
It’s tempting to think that Christians today have spectacularly failed to bear faithful witness to the gospel. But that’s not the case, as Nadya Williams argues in her book, Cultural Christians in the Early Church. Confusing gospel and culture is not a modern phenomenon; it’s a perennial one.
Last but not least, I’m going to include two of my own: Prayers for the Pilgrimage and, in the form of a chapter essay in a multi-author volume, Theology, Modernity and the Visual Arts.
Edited by Ben Quash and Chloë Reddaway, TMVA is a gorgeous art book that also happens to include top-shelf essays on the intersection of theology and visual art by scholars representing a range of disciplines. I’ve got an essay in the mix that’s going to function as one of five essays in an academic book that I’m eventually going to write on how the five senses enable us to “sense” God rightly.
With my prayer book with Phaedra, we’ve got two prayers for the end of the calendar year: one for a “Good Ending” to the year and one for a “Hard Ending” to the year. We’ve also got a prayer for New Year’s Day, along with prayers for each day of Christmastide.
Whatever it is that you think you might want to say to God at the ending and beginning of a new year, then, we’ve got you covered. And you’ve got Phaedra’s gorgeous art to nourish your body and soul with beauty in the year to come.
