2025: writing

As best I can tell, I published thirty total pieces this year: three in academic journals, twelve essays and reviews in ten different magazines, and fifteen columns for Christianity Today. That comes to about two and a half per month, or a little over one every other week.

That number’s going to come down in 2026. It’s the result of a sixteen-month sabbatical from teaching, and it doesn’t even count the talks and lectures, the travel, the podcasts, and the things I wrote that won’t be published for another month or two. Plus the grant application, and the book proposal, and the …, and the …

In a word, I over-committed heading back into the fall semester, and I’m intentionally trying to cut back as the spring approaches. We’ll see if I’m successful.

For now, here’s what I wrote in 2025.

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Academic

“Stephen Fowl and Theological Interpretation: Retrospect and Prospect,” Journal of Theological Interpretation 19:1 (2025): 130–36. Link here.

 Frances M. Young, Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity, Vol. 1 (Scripture, the Genesis of Doctrine) and Vol. 2 (Scripture in Doctrinal Dispute), in The Heythrop Journal 66:6 (2025): 654–656. Link here.

Philip G. Ziegler, God’s Adversary and Ours: A Brief Theology of the Devil, in Modern Theology (forthcoming). Early access here.

Essays and Reviews

A Future Worthy of Life (Mere Orthodoxy, 7 January 2025). Reflections on Houellebecq, decadence, and dystopian fiction, with an assist from P. D. James.

How to Raise Readers, in Thirty-Five Steps (Front Porch Republic, 31 January 2025). What it sounds like. In my view, my “funnest” piece of the year.

Generation Autodidact (Mockingbird, 12 February 2025). In which I admit how little I’ve read, and try not to be embarrassed about it.

Luddite Pedagogy (Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 April 2025). There are dozens of us!

Goldilocks Protestantism (First Things, 4 April 2025). Probably my most-read piece of the year, at least based on feedback from friends, emails from strangers, and essays written in response to it.

Low Church in High Places (The Public Discourse, 21 May 2025). A follow-up or companion piece to the First Things essay on Protestantism.

Lexicon for the Phenomenon (The Hedgehog Review, 3 July 2025). My aliens essay. This one didn’t seem to get the traction I’d hoped it would. Oh well.

The Stickiness of Religion (The Lamp, 11 July 2025). My attempt to be just to a good book while skeptical of some of the methodological assumptions of the author’s academic discipline.

No Love Lost for Heretics (Los Angeles Review of Books, 30 July 2025). Come for the summaries, stay for the criticisms.

Politics for Losers (First Things, September 2025). If I had to choose, I think this is the best written thing I published this year. I’m happy that, even though Phil disagreed with most of my criticisms, he thought it was fair.

The Connector (Arc, 9 October 2025). This is the one I worked on the hardest. Turns out profiles aren’t easy! With help, I think it turned out all right.

Keeping the Faith (Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 October 2025). This one seemed to vanish into the mist, but I’m really proud of it. A tough book to review.

Christianity Today

A Little Book About a Little Word That Contains the World (4 February 2025). A review of Wesley Hill’s book about Easter.

Ross Douthat Bets on Belief (11 February 2025). A review of Douthat’s book on religion.

Baptism Is Not Optional (18 March 2025). A 3,000-word invitation to evangelicals to have a higher, sacramental view of baptism.

Christians Are Conspiracy Theorists (2 April 2025). An attempted intervention in the conspiracy theory discourse.

How Dude Perfect Won Me Over (28 April 2025). A fun little candy bar of a column.

Finally, a Tech Book That Doesn’t Pull Punches (3 June 2025). A review of Clare Morell’s new book on teens and smartphones.

Just Say No to Online Church (10 June 2025). A critical review of a new book commending hybrid worship. Probably the most negative thing I’ve ever written.

The God Who Must Not Be Named (1 July 2025). A plea for gentile Christians to stop enunciating YHWH aloud in Christian worship and preaching.

Put Down the Shofar (4 August 2025). A plea for gentile Christians to cease and desist from ethno-religious cosplay.

Hating Hitler Is Not Enough (12 August 2025). A review of Alec Ryrie’s new book.

The Bible Is About Jesus—But Not Jesus Without His Bride (26 August 2025). A review of Jonathan Linebaugh’s new book on Scripture.

The Way We Debate Atonement Is a Mess (16 September 2025). An effort at mediating the PSA wars. I think it threads the needle, but I leave that to others.

You Don’t Have to Be Radical (7 October 2025). A letter to my younger self. I’m not a funny writer, but one line in here made my editor laugh out loud.

In Netflix’s ‘Frankenstein,’ Monster Is More Compelling Than Maker (11 November 2025). A review of Guillermo del Toro’s new film.

In Bethlehem, God Chose What Is Weak to Shame the Strong (16 December 2025). A reading of Christmas as a revelation of classical divine attributes.

Simon Leys

2025 was the year I discovered Simon Leys.

The discovery came in the Regent College bookstore in Vancouver. The book was The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays. I’m a sucker for essay collections; this one was a NYRB Classics edition; it was big and hefty and the topics were gloriously wide ranging.

Somehow I’d never heard of Leys’ name. For the fellow uninitiated, “Simon Leys” is the pen name for Pierre Ryckmans (1935–2014), a Belgian essayist, novelist, translator, and scholar of Chinese literature, art, and calligraphy. He read, spoke, and wrote in French, English, and Chinese. His 1971 book about Mao was a bombshell in the playground of the postmodern French intellectuals—it woke everyone up to the unvarnished truth of the Cultural Revolution. He lived and taught for decades in Australia as a professor. He won a raft of awards, had a novel adapted into a film, and wrote gorgeous prose about everything under the sun. He was also Roman Catholic.

Above all, Leys was a man of letters. To read him is to be inducted into another world, the world of literature, a world made of books, words, and the men and women who write them. Yes, history and politics enter in, but it’s the words that matter, the selection of which words in what order to what end. The man knew style because he possessed it himself.

Simon Leys was a man of principle who did not flinch from criticizing living dictators, “China experts,” and academics full of hot air. He was a moralist who refused to moralize and an aesthete who believed in truth. He had no compunction about calling pundits’ and intellectuals’ bluff, as in his extraordinary reviews, respectively, of Christopher Hitchens’ book about Mother Teresa and of Edward Said’s Orientalism. (The final sentence of the latter review: “It is nice to see that Said is now rediscovering such a basic notion; I only deplore that it took him 300 pages of twisted, obscure, incoherent, ill-informed and badly written diatribe to reach at last one sound and fundamental truism.”)

Reading writers like Leys is more than a breath of fresh air. It’s a gust of wind at your back. It shows you your own moral and intellectual cowardice, not to mention the absolute void that is your learning compared to such a man. But far from enervating, the epiphany empowers. It’s a call and therefore a calling: This life, the writing life, the life of the mind in the life of letters, is possible. Don’t give up, not yet.

“There is no sublunary topic,” Leys wrote, “on which Samuel Johnson did not, at some time, issue a pithy and definitive statement.” You could say the same about Simon Leys. He was that good. I’m grateful to have discovered his voice, and through his so many others.