A Look Back at the Year in Reviews

I’m writing this week’s newsletter ahead of schedule, just a few days before we’ll gamely (or foolishly) try corralling Ezra onto a plane for a Christmas visit to my parents in Pennsylvania. Last Christmas, when our son had his first encounter with air travel, he handled the flight out of O’Hare like a dream. Coming home was, let’s say, more of a mixed bag.

Hopefully, by the time you read this, we’ll be enjoying some holiday rest rather than pleading with the FAA to reconsider that lifetime ban. Mercifully, for yours truly and my hard-working colleagues, the CT publishing calendar also enjoys some holiday rest this time of year, when we mainly populate our website with end-of-year retrospective lists identifying staff and reader favorites among our news reports, think pieces, testimonies, obituaries, and so on.

For my part, this means an annual conferral with CT’s resident number-crunchers to see which book reviews attracted the most eyeballs, online at least. As always, I have my questions and gripes. (Why didn’t this review rank higher? Or that one?) But once again I can heartily applaud our readers for their fine taste and discernment.

Anyhow, why not survey the list for yourself? Happy reading! (Or re-reading, perhaps.) And here’s to more great reviews in the year to come.

CT Books Goes Live!

One more plug for a CT highlight from 2024 before I sign off for the year. Did you manage to catch our live CT Book of the Year event from earlier in December? If not, there’s good news: We recorded the whole thing and posted it on YouTube. You can watch it here.

As a quick refresher, we invited Gavin Ortlund and Brad East—the authors of CT’s Book of the Year and runner-up—to come field questions from our editors (and from each other) about their respective works before a real-time online audience.

Now, this wasn’t some fancy, red-carpet gala (maybe next year?), so you only see us in those Zoom-era meeting squares, beaming in from homes, offices, and (in my case) a local library study room. But in my opinion, echoed by CT colleagues I heard from the day afterward, the whole production went off splendidly. We hadn’t tried anything like it before, so it was encouraging to pass the first test without any apparent technological misfires.

More importantly, the conversation itself was great fun. Both authors appeared every bit as engaging and erudite on camera as they are on the printed page. You can see why Ortlund excels from the pulpit, and East in the college classroom. We capped the program at one hour, but it might have easily stretched on to double that length. (Sadly, time ran out before I could pose the preferred question of books editors everywhere: “What else are you reading these days?”)

Matt Reynolds

Senior Editor, Books

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As this issue hits your mailboxes after the US election and as you prepare for the holidays, it can be easy to feel lost in darkness. In this issue, you’ll read of the piercing light of Christ that illuminates the darkness of drug addiction at home and abroad, as Angela Fulton in Vietnam and Maria Baer in Portland report about Christian rehab centers. Also, Carrie McKean explores the complicated path of estrangement and Brad East explains the doctrine of providence. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt shows us how art surprises, delights, and retools our imagination for the Incarnation, while Jeremy Treat reminds us of an ancient African bishop’s teachings about Immanuel. Finally, may you be surprised by the nearness of the “Winter Child,” whom poet Malcolm Guite guides us enticingly toward. Happy Advent and Merry Christmas.

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