Best Books of 2015

These were favorites of this year in a variety of genres.

The Art of Asking, Amanda Palmer (best memoir, life-changing)

Girl in a Band, Kim Gordon (best memoir, creativity expanding)

Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, Kelly Brown Douglas (best analysis of emerging theological category)

Culture and the Death of God, Terry Eagleton (best literary criticism on secularity)

Negative Certainties, Jean-Luc Marion (best translated phenomenology)

The Wake: A Novel, Paul Kingsnorth (best English not in English)

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates (best non-fiction, epistolary)

Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus, Reggie Williams (best theological history)

A Legend of the Future, Agustin de Rojas (best Cuban science fiction)

The Politics of Jesus: A Hispanic Political Theology, Miguel de la Torre (best Jesus, liberation)

On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, Alice Goffman (best deep ethnography)

Hidden Inheritance: Family Secrets, Memory, and Faith, Heidi Neumark (best #lutherancreative)

The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West, Todd Green (most important book)

Christo-Fiction: The Ruins of Athens and Jerusalem, Francois Laruelle (incomprehensible comprehensible philosophy of Christ)

What Should We Do With Our Brains, Catherine Malabou (the book I recommended most often in 2015)

The Age of the Crisis of Man, Mark Greif (idiosyncratic literary criticism)

Numenera

The Love of God: Divine Gift, Human Gratitude, and Mutual Faithfulness in Judaism, Jon Levenson

Making All Things New, Ilia Delio

Johannes Bugenhagen, selected writings (best Reformation era collection)

Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers, Avivah Zornberg (best biblical criticism)

The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi (best near future science fiction)

The Folly of God, John Caputo (best new presentation of a theological position)

The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann's Dialectical Theology, David Congdon (also best historical theology)

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World, Andrea Wulf

Heidegger's Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in 'Being and Time' and Beyond, Ryan Coyne (best cross-over between philosophy and theology)

The Lion of Rora, Cristos Gage (best graphic novel about Waldensians)

Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures, Paul Griffiths

Slow Pilgrim: Collected Poems, Scott Cairns

The Homebrewed Christianity Guide to Jesus, Tripp Fuller (best Jesus, zesty)