HOME > Brilliant and Beautiful Blog

Favorite Books of 2022

I love to read. Of course, being a professor helps. I get to read as part of my job. That’s good. But I also love to read for the sheer pleasure of it. When it comes to fiction, I love entering into secondary worlds and journeying along with the characters of the story. Often non-fiction reads like a good story too: life is life, story is story, and often the two kiss (a loose paraphrase of one of my favorite nonfiction stories of the year, All that is Sad is Untrue).

Favorite Books of 2021

I love to read. It’s partly why I’m an academic today. What could be better than reading, writing, teaching, and learning every day? Reading books awakens me: to truth, goodness, and beauty. I try, each year, to read broadly. This year, I managed to read 47 books. I’ve been recording every book read in a book log for over 10 years now. Whenever I finish a book, I list the date finished, the title, author, and a one sentence summary of the book. As has become my custom, I offer to you my favorite reads of the past year in philosophy, apologetics and theology, fiction, and non-fiction.

Favorite Books of 2020

2020 has been a year of change for my family. We moved in the middle of a pandemic from Texas to Florida. I started a new job as a professor of philosophy and the director of a new program in philosophy at Palm Beach Atlantic University. We left behind two of our children in Texas–both college students at Baylor. Our younger two sons have had to endure an on-again/off-again year at a new school. But there have been many constants, even in the midst of change. Family. Jesus. And the reading of books! And this blog post.

Month Six as a Henry Fellow: Human Uniqueness, Origin, and Destiny

I’m having a fantastic time as a Henry Fellow at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School this academic year. To date, I’ve written four chapters in my popular level book tentatively called Eleven Stones: Discovering the True Story of the World, the majority of a chapter on “Teleological Arguments” for a textbook, a chapter on “Neo-Aristotelian Accounts of Divine Creation” to be included in a forthcoming book on divine causation, and the first part of a book on Theism and the Nature of Nature.

My Favorite Books of 2019

Each year around this time I list my top books read over the past year in philosophy, theology, apologetics, fiction, and non-fiction. As much as it pains me, I’ll restrict myself to the top three in each of these categories. As is custom, I will list them with my one sentence description of the book, as written in my book log. As a bonus, this year I also include the favorite reads of Ethel and the kids! Here we go:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 Next >>