A Quick Update + My 2025 Reading List

My favorite reads of 2025, and a chance to be among the first 100

Dear Readers,

Before the year closes, I want to say thank you.

If you’ve read this newsletter in 2025—avidly or occassionally—thank you for giving it your attention. As Simone Weil observed, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Amidst the many, much flashier things competing for your attention this year, you have been generous with me, and I am grateful.

This space is a place to explore embodied Catholic bioethics, grounded in prayer, family life, and the ordinary limits of being human. Every essay grows out of reading, research, and long hours of thinking carefully about embodiment, technology, motherhood, and hope. That kind of work takes time—and it also takes resources.

In 2026, I want to keep building this together.

If this newsletter has helped you think, pray, or see these questions more clearly, I’m inviting the first 100 readers to become paid subscribers at a discounted rate of $4/month ($1/week).

Paid subscribers make this work possible and help shape the character and future of the newsletter. They also receive:

• access to a subscriber-only chat for conversation and questions

• a monthly letter from me, written more like correspondence than commentary

• sneak peeks and early drafts of essays and book projects as they take shape

Free readers are—and will remain—very welcome here. But the readers who choose to support the work are the ones who make its depth, steadiness, and future possible.

Thank you for reading, thinking, and praying alongside me this year.

Here’s to building something worth tending in 2026.

AMDG,

Samantha

P.S. A few readers have already joined—be among the first 100 to help shape this space from the start.

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Books I Read in 2025

Below are the books I read this year, loosely categorized but otherwise in no particular order. I love seeing what other people are reading in similar posts, so I hope you find something here you enjoy.

This year’s most repeated authors were C.S. Lewis (5), Wendell Berry (2+lots of essays), Ginny Yurich (2), and Katherine Center (whose novels I shamelessly binged, making her the winner by a landslide at 10).

If the list below looks long to you, let me just say that beyond reading, writing, and gardening, I really have no other hobbies. You be amazed what you can accomplish when you apply singular focus to the exlusion of all else (for better or for worse!).

For more on how I “do it all,” you can read this year’s most popular post.

What were your favorite reads of 2025??

Research

• Fabricated Man: The Ethics of Genetic Control by Paul Ramsey. Top research book of 2025.*

• Theology of the Body by Pope St. John Paul II, translated by Michael Waldstein. Too much to say. More later.

• Bioethics and Character of Human Life by Gil Meilander. Loved. 10/10.

• The Case Against Perfection by Michael Sandel. A nice start to refuting the eugenic urge, but we are going to need to do so much better.

• Begotten or Made by Oliver O’Donovan. Don’t miss the introduction by Matthew Lee Anderson, which is amazing, whatever he tells you. Maybe I can convince him to write a forward for one of my books some day!

• These Beautiful Bones by Emily Stimpson Chapman. Excellent application and continuation of Pope St. John Paul II’s theology of the body in everyday experiences.

• IVF Is Not the Way by Stacy Trasancos. Great philosophical and pastoral explanation of the Church’s teachings on IVF.

• Everyday Miracles: Curing Autoimmune Disease with Stem Cells by Dr. Richard Burt. Incredible. Interviewed Dr. Burt on Brave New Us.

• Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth by Dr. Catherine Pakaluk. Fascinating and deeply moving. Interviewed Dr. Pakaluk on Brave New Us.

• The Transhumanist Temptation by Grayson Quay. So good. Wish I’d written it. Interviewed Quay on Brave New Us.

• Mom Genes by Abigail Tucker. Fascinating. Best book cover ever. Will cite extensively in upcoming project on embodied motherhood.

Homeschooling/Parenting

• Homeschooling: You’re Doing It Right Just by Doing It by Ginny Yurich. Better for unschoolers I think.

• Until the Streetlights Come On by Ginny Yurich. I preferred this one, hands down, and highly recommend for all parents—homeschooling and otherwise.

• Habits for a Sacred Home by Jennifer Pepito. Different than I expected. Much more of a defence against modern life than I’d anticipated.

• Teaching from Rest by Sarah Mackenzie. Required reading for homeschool moms. I reread almost every year.

Spiritual

• Searching for and Maintaining Peace by Fr. Jacques Phillipe. Should be required reading for all Christians. Top spiritual reading of 2025.*

• The Power of a Praying Wife by Stormie Ormartian. Helpful, practical, and powerful.

• Letters to Malcom Chiefly on Prayer by C.S. Lewis. The positive counterpart to The Screwtape Letters (which is practically free rught now on Amazon). Some fascinating insights into prayer that I had never heard elsewhere.

• God in the Dock by C.S. Lewis. If Lewis had a Substack…

• The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer. Challenging and practical.

Tech + Culture

• Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. Good practical tips.

• The Tech-Wise Family by Andy Crouch. Good reminders.

• The Tech Exit by Clare Morell. Tough, but necessary.

• The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry. Still true. If I am ever able to write half as well as Wendell Berry, I will die happy.

Fiction

• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. Read because it is one of Bishop Baron’s top 5 books of all time. Hated it 2/3 of the way. Have been converted and transformed. Top novel of 2025*

• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. Am slowly making my way through Austen.

• Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry. Deeply moved, and still struck by Hanna’s observation that her adult children, because they have city jobs, have to pay for everything they need rather than provide for themselves, are “starting out so behind.”

• Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis. First in the space trilogy, but not required to read the others.

• Perelandra by C.S. Lewis. Second in the space trilogy, and my favorite. Continue to be amazed by the way Lewis’s fiction makes his nonfiction seem more real.

• That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis. Final book in the space trilogy. Can be read on its own. Lewis said it was the fictional version of The Abolition of Man, and this is a dytopia whose warnings should be taken seriously.

• The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells. Excellent short novel for those interested in science, technology, medicine, and/or bioethics.

• Next by Michael Crichton. His final novel. Terrifying because it is impossible to tell whether the headlines included are fact or fiction.

• The Ghost and Mrs Muir by R.A. Dick. A rare occassion when the movie is better. Definitely watch the movie!

• Happiness for Beginners by Katherine Center. This was my gateway drug to my month-long binge of Center’s novels. Avoid the movie at all costs.

• The Bright Side of Disaster by Katherine Center. She captures early motherhood so well.

• Hello Stranger by Katherine Center. What if a portrait artist suddenly became face blind?

• What You Wish For by Katherine Center. Picks up with the adorable Duncan from Happiness for Beginners.

• Things You Save in a Fire by Katherine Center. A novel about a female firefighter could have been obnoxiously feminista (as Dr. Laura would say), but instead it was just awesome.

• How to Walk Away by Katherine Center. How could a novel about recovering from a plane crash be so not depressing? Center is the queen of gratitude.

• The Lost Husband by Katherine Center. Again, avoid the film.

• The Love Haters by Katherine Center. This was the only one that way just okay. Plot was far too over the top and convenient.

• The Rom-Commers by Katherine Center. As a writer, this one was especially fun.

• The Bodyguard by Katherine Center. Also great.

• The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkein. My moto for this newsletter:

  “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
  “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide.

  All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”