The first half of 2025 promises a ton of excellent new books! Here are 60 of our most anticipated books of Spring 2025 for Christian Readers…
These anticipated books of Spring 2025 (released in the first half of the year) wrestle with some of the deepest challenges of our day, and will orient us toward faithful living in the present and in years to come.
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[ TOP 10 – Part 1 ] [ Top 10 – Part 2 ]
[ Theology ] [ Formation ] [ Church ]
[ NonFiction ] [ Literature ] [ Biography / Kids ]
[ Coming in 2025! ]
Page 1: TOP 10 – Part 1
(In Alphabetical Order by Author’s Last Name)

Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry
Beth Allison Barr
(Brazos Press, March 18)
As a pastor’s wife for twenty-five years, Beth Allison Barr has lived with assumptions about what she should do and who she should be.
In Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, Barr draws on that experience and her academic expertise to trace the history of the role of the pastor’s wife, showing how it both helped and hurt women in conservative Protestant traditions. While they gained an important leadership role, it came at a deep cost: losing independent church leadership opportunities that existed throughout most of church history and strengthening a gender hierarchy that prioritized male careers.
Barr examines the connection between the decline of female ordination and the rise of the role of pastor’s wife in the evangelical church, tracing its patterns in the larger history (ancient, medieval, Reformation, and modern) of Christian women’s leadership. By expertly blending historical and personal narrative, she equips pastors’ wives to better advocate for themselves while helping the church understand the origins of the role as well as the historical reality of ordained women.

Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand
Jeff Chu
(Convergent Books, March 25)
A profound meditation on nature, heritage, and belonging, from an accomplished journalist who left New York City for life on a working farm
“I needed this book. I think you need it, too.”—Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful
In his late thirties, Jeff Chu left his job as a magazine writer and found himself at Princeton Theological Seminary’s “Farminary”—a twenty-one-acre working farm where students learn to cultivate the earth while examining life’s biggest questions. Now, he unpacks what he learned about creating “good soil,” both literally and figuratively, drawing lessons from the rhythms of growth, decay, and regeneration that define life on the land.
In gorgeous, transporting reflections, Chu introduces us to the cast of characters, human and not, who became his teachers. While observing the egrets that visit the pond, the worms that turn waste into fertile soil, and the Chinese long beans that get passed over in the farm’s CSA, Chu considers our desire to belong, the story behind the food on our plate, and the significance of his own roots. What is the earth trying to tell us, if we’ll only stop and listen?
Good Soil helps readers connect to the land and to one another at a time when we seem drawn most to the phones in our hands. For nature lovers, foodies, and anyone who has daydreamed about a more fulfilling life, this book is a tribute to friendship, to the sacredness of our bond with the natural world, and to how love can grow from the unlikeliest of places.

Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood
Angela Denker
(Broadleaf Books, March 25)
White boys and men are dangerous.
White boys and men are struggling.
Both of these statements are staggeringly true in America today. By far, most large-scale mass shooters are white men. White men also die by suicide more often than any other demographic. In this sensitive, searing, and unsparing look at American boyhood, journalist, mother, and pastor Angela Denker investigates the sometimes-tragic stories of boyhood across the United States.
Disciples of White Jesus is a comprehensive look at the rise in radicalization among young white men in America, especially focused on the role of right-wing Christianity in the increase of religious-based hatred and violence. Denker goes deep into the online rabbit holes of right-wing Christian influencers and conservative Christian ideology to understand how the preaching of “traditional gender roles” and “submission of women” has led to anger, outrage, loneliness, depression, and limiting identities for young white Christian men across America.
Casting her journalist’s eye across the US, Denker retraces the steps of a racist South Carolina mass shooter and a Phoenix skinhead turned Evangelical pastor, interviews middle school teachers and coaches in the Midwest, and introduces us to young men across the country who will both confirm and confound our ideas about American boyhood–stories about boys and men who are forging new identities grounded in kindness, grace, respect, and even joy. A must-read for parents, grandparents, educators, coaches, faith leaders, researchers, and all who care about the state of American families, boys themselves, and the safety of American society at large.

Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism
Eve Ewing
(One World Books, February 11)
“This book will transform the way you see this country.”—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force makes it clear that the opposite is true: The U.S. school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives.
In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that our schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to “civilize” Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Education was not an afterthought for the Founding Fathers; it was envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as an institution that would fortify the country’s racial hierarchy. Ewing argues that these dynamics persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. The most insidious aspects of this system fall below the radar in the forms of standardized testing, academic tracking, disciplinary policies, and uneven access to resources.
By demonstrating that it’s in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day.

The Anti-Greed Gospel: Why the Love of Money Is the Root of Racism and How the Church Can Create a New Way Forward
Malcolm Foley
(Brazos Press, February 11)
“A forceful call to recognize the roots of American inequality and a solid starting point for Christians who want to help fix them.”–Publishers Weekly
Racism is not about hate and ignorance. It’s about greed. And it always has been.
Black Christian historian Malcolm Foley explores this idea in The Anti-Greed Gospel, showing how the desire for power and money–what some call “racial capitalism”–causes violence and exploitation.
Foley reviews the history of racial violence in the United States and connects the killings of modern-day Black Americans to the history of lynching in America. He helps the contemporary church wrestle with the questions racial violence brings up: How can we become communities that show generosity and resist greed? What is the next step in the journey for racial justice?
Readers will walk away with a better understanding of how they can resist greed that exploits others, love their neighbor more completely, and build communities of deep solidarity, anti-violence, and truth telling.
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