The Editors' Best of 2025
If you’re looking for additions to your read/watch list for 2026, try our favorites from 2025. Merry Christmas and a happy New Year from the editors at Fare Forward!
Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life by Gillian Rose
Sarah Clark, Editor-in-Chief
“Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.” Philosopher Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life begins with this epitaph from the Orthodox saint Staretz Silouan—a fitting choice for the book she wrote while dying from a sudden and aggressive form of cancer. Part memoir, part philosophical reflection from a brilliant thinker, the book begins in media res with a trip to New York to visit an old friend (now dying of AIDS at 47) and to meet the 97-year-old Edna, who has cancer of the face, drinks a bottle of Calvados every day, and is “an annunciation, a message, very old and very new.” Chapter 2 concerns the author’s trip to Auschwitz—and so on. “There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy,” Rose writes, and she lays her own need for mercy clear to the bone. Weaving back and forth in time, from childhood and her parents’ divorce to the final indignities of AIDS (her friend’s) and cancer (her own), this remarkable book delves deeply into life, suffering, and, most importantly, love, which is the work of every life.
When all the pieces come together, Bad Shabbos tells a genuinely creative story that is both moving and riotously funny.
Bad Shabbos, directed by Daniel Robbins
Sara Holston, Managing Editor
Outside of the classics, a tight, simple, but well-crafted film can be a rare find these days. While I can still get behind a 2.5+ hour blockbuster featuring extravagant special effects and often-overdone plotlines, I miss the days when they ran alongside shorter, smaller-budget comedies or dramas based on basic, everyday narratives. Bad Shabbos, which played this summer in my local community movie theater, gave me precisely that. Coming in at a clean 84 minutes, this sharp-edged comedy takes place over a shabbat dinner in which the families of a young interfaith couple are set to meet for the first time. Of course, shenanigans ensue, throwing messy family dynamics into sharp relief and challenging the characters to find the best parts of themselves, and of each other, to muddle through. If I tried to give you much more detail, you might start to think the premise sounded a little absurd—and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. But when all the pieces come together, Bad Shabbos tells a genuinely creative story that is both moving and riotously funny, and it’s well worth coming along for the ride.
While beauty can be a means of salvation, even the best artists are mere mortals.
Hadestown by Anaïs Mitchell
Whitney Rio-Ross, Poetry Editor
I’m shocked to find myself putting a musical on this list, but Hadestown has haunted me in the best way. Set in a New Orleans-esque city and an industrial underworld, it offers a political retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. The jazz elements alone set it apart from the usual musical fare, but it’s the story’s message about art that shook me. In a year when the U.S. government gutted arts funding, many artists have written about their work as witness and resistance. I strongly believe that art can yield both personal and societal change, yet I’ve been troubled by some writers teetering into self-aggrandizement and even being dismissive of more prosaic forms of solidarity. Hadestown was a welcome antidote to this attitude, at once an inspiring and sobering look at the power of art. It shows that while beauty can be a means of salvation, even the best artists are mere mortals. This story reminded me that an artist must create with hope and humility, striving to be a worthy steward, not a savior.
The novel carefully explores the romance of military pursuits and “the higher cause” while questioning whether any violence is truly honorable.
Waverley by Walter Scott
Michael Carlowicz, Executive Editor
When looking for a novel to read, I like to ask for recommendations from friends whose taste I wish to emulate. My favorite read this year was recommended to me by J.R.R. Tolkien, John Henry Newman, and Jane Austen. Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, the first novel in the series for which the author became known, is a burst of fresh air for adventure readers who want to escape the stifling sauna of seduction, gore, and heartlessness that characterizes fiction in 2025. A classic bildungsroman, the story follows Edward Waverley through the Jacobite rising of 1745 as the young Englishman struggles to reconcile his preexisting loyalties with new convictions of justice and honor. Although set against the backdrop of a brewing war, the novel resists any temptation to bloodlust, perhaps because of how recent the historical setting of the novel (alternatively titled ‘Tis Sixty Years Since) was for Scott’s audience. The novel carefully explores the romance of military pursuits and “the higher cause” while questioning whether any violence is truly honorable. At 211-years-old, Waverley is the perfect story for readers who love well-bred eighteenth-century characters doing more than gossiping in parlors all day—and yes, there is still a swoon-worthy love interest.
Baby! is a balm for the past decade’s frayed conversation on manhood.
Baby! by Dijon
Will Bryant, Editor
It was a big year for indie artist Dijon Duenas. On the heels of producer credits and a feature on Justin Bieber’s new album SWAG, he released his sophomore album Baby! to much acclaim. The album pushes the envelope on the sonic landscape he explored on his first album, 2021’s Absolutely. Baby! is both a more experimental take on Absolutely’s R&B core and, in a way, a return to nineties boom-bap basics for Dijon, who had toyed with softer Americana textures on Absolutely.
The album is, quite simply, about Dijon’s first child, a baby boy born in 2023. This lyrical content, set against a backdrop of the finest procreative R&B, produces twelve songs of unapologetic fatherly masculinity. Baby! is a balm for the past decade’s frayed conversation on manhood, and it is required reading for the meat-eating Rogan enjoyers and the tote-toting matcha-drinkers alike. A friend recently described her dating pool as either “embarrassing or performative, and there’s no middle ground.” Baby! conquers this dilemma because it contains the breadth of masculine expression. Over the course of the record Dijon is by turns virile and nurturing, blustering and self-reflective, showing strength and admitting weakness.
With grace, wisdom, and wit, [Hamman] makes fresh these ancient tools of spiritual formation while refusing to surrender their countercultural potency.
Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for A Whole and Holy Life by Grace Hamman
Anna Heetderks, Editor
Over the past year, I (along with many others) have found myself contemplating the role of virtue in private and public life, and was thus immediately intrigued when I first stumbled across Ask of Old Paths. Dusting off pride and humility, envy and love, and six other virtue-vice pairs, Hamman reveals their sharp edges, and how they penetrate our (distinctly post-medieval) culture. She frames the virtue of abstinence, for example, as a proper self-love that pays attention to the body and challenges our tendencies toward immediate gratification, while fostering deliberate reflection regarding the nature of our desires, our identity as embodied beings, and our dependence on God and creation. Hamman evinces a rich knowledge of her source material, engaging deeply with Scripture, a plethora of old saints, obscure medieval devotional guides, and modern-day thinkers (including, appropriately, Alasdair MacIntyre and his ever-salient After Virtue). With grace, wisdom, and wit, she makes fresh these ancient tools of spiritual formation while refusing to surrender their countercultural potency.
Although undoubtedly a horror, Coogler’s film leaps beyond the bounds of the genre to deliver something that is, yes, scary, but also an homage to Black culture and experience.
Sinners by Ryan Coogler
Najma Zahira, Editor
The best movies reveal some great truth about the world. Typically, I enjoy truths that make me feel warm and fuzzy inside: love abounds even in the toughest situations, the indomitable human spirit, etc. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which follows two Black twin war veterans in 1930s Mississippi as they prepare for the opening night of their juke joint, strangely falls into this category. Although undoubtedly a horror, Coogler’s film leaps beyond the bounds of the genre to deliver something that is, yes, scary, but also an homage to Black culture and experience. Coogler lays bare the often unsaid–the lasting stain of religious colonialism and slavery in our country–but couches it in the joy that abounds in the freedom these communities have made for themselves. The presence and power that blues music, a musical descendant of slave spirituals, holds throughout the film makes this abundantly clear. While watching, I felt the full range of human emotions: fear, hope, sadness, joy—which I did not anticipate when I entered the theater. Sinners is worth your time because it doesn’t just reveal truths we want to hear, it reveals truths we need to hear.
