As an editor at The Gospel Coalition, my life intersects a lot with good content that we publish. But I’ve always enjoyed keeping up with other publications, and at the end of each year I like taking stock of the pieces I found most intriguing, insightful, amusing, and delightful. Here are 10 pieces that have stuck with me followed by some honorable mentions.
1. Russell Moore, Watchful Dragons (Touchstone)
“The work of Neil Gaiman is one more reminder that however transcendence-averse modern cerebra might be, the message has not reached the modern imagination. Even in the sterilized secularity of the West, there are yet signposts in a strange land. There are yet intimations of interest in something, or someone, just out of reach, even when those intimations are safely hidden away in science fiction or fantasy. Christians should take note. Perhaps the way to speak to a transcendence-starved West might include not only a cathedral liturgy or a revival tent, but also, even still, a lion, a witch, and a doorway, just where one least expects it, to Narnia.”
2. Tim Wu, The Tyranny of Convenience (The New York Times)
“We must never forget the joy of doing something slow and something difficult, the satisfaction of not doing what is easiest. The constellation of inconvenient choices may be all that stands between us and a life of total, efficient conformity.”
3. Hannah Long, The Steward of Middle-earth (The Weekly Standard)
“Now, after more than 40 years, at the age of 94, Christopher Tolkien has laid down his editor’s pen, having completed a great labor of quiet, scholastic commitment to his father’s vision. It is the concluding public act of a gentleman and scholar, the last member of a club that became a pivotal part of 20th-century literature: the Inklings. It is the end of an era.”
4. Dane Ortlund, Gospel Reflections (Strawberry-Rhubarb Theology)
“There is an entire psychological substructure that, due to the Fall, is a near-constant emission of relational leveraging, fear-stuffing, nervousness, score-keeping, neurotic controlling, anxiety-festering silliness that is not something I say or even think so much as something I breathe. You can smell this on people, though some of us are good at hiding it. And I’m seeing more and more, bit by bit, that if you trace this fountain of scurrying haste, in all its various manifestations, down to the root, you don’t find childhood difficulties or a Myers-Briggs diagnosis or Freudian impulses. You find gospel deficit. All the worry and dysfunction and resentment is the natural fruit of living in a mental universe of Law. The gospel really is what brings rest, wholeness, flourishing, shalom — that existential calm which for brief, gospel-sane moments settles over you and lets you see for a moment that in Christ you truly are invincible. The verdict really is in; nothing can touch you.”
5. Joseph Epstein, The Bookish Life: How to Read and Why (First Things)
“The best arrangement, like that between the head and the heart, is one of balance between life and reading. One brings one’s experience of life to one’s reading, and one’s reading to one’s experience of life. You can get along without reading serious books — many extraordinary, large-hearted, highly intelligent people have — but why, given the chance, would you want to? Books make life so much richer, grander, more splendid. The bookish life is not for everyone, nor are its rewards immediately evident, but at a minimum, taking it up you are assured, like the man said, of never being out of work.”
6. Gracy Olmstead, The Art of the Stroll (The American Conservative)
“Walking is a slow and porous experience. The words we use to describe it — meandering, sauntering, strolling — have their own leisurely and gentle cadence and suggest a sort of unhurried enjoyment. But to walk is also to be vulnerable: it forces us into physical interaction with surrounding streets, homes, and people. This can delay us, annoy us, even put us in danger. But it connects us to community in a way that cars never can.”
7. Frank Bruni, Aristotle’s Wrongful Death (The New York Times)
“Colleges shouldn’t lose sight of what makes traditional majors — even the arcane ones — so meaningful, especially now. And they shouldn’t downgrade the nonvocational mission of higher education: to cultivate minds, prepare young adults for enlightened citizenship, give them a better sense of their perch in history and connect them to traditions that transcend the moment. . . . Majoring in anything . . . is a useful retort to the infinite distractions, short attention spans and staccato communications of the smartphone era.”
8. Jeff Haanen, God of the Second Shift (Christianity Today)
“Today, when American evangelical leaders talk about work, the working class — which is two-thirds of the American workforce — is largely absent. What are we missing?”
9. Charissa Crotts, Elizabeth Rieth, and Isaiah Johnson, Papered Over (WORLD)
“Biblical truth-telling at college newspapers can sometimes conflict with the way administrators want to portray the school. Here’s a case study of how Liberty University handled the tension last spring.”
10. Andrew Sullivan, America’s New Religions (The New Yorker)
“[T]he banality of the god of progress, the idea that the best life is writing explainers for Vox in order to make the world a better place, never quite slakes the thirst for something deeper. Liberalism is a set of procedures, with an empty center, not a manifestation of truth, let alone a reconciliation to mortality. But, critically, it has long been complemented and supported in America by a religion distinctly separate from politics, a tamed Christianity that rests, in Jesus’ formulation, on a distinction between God and Caesar. And this separation is vital for liberalism, because if your ultimate meaning is derived from religion, you have less need of deriving it from politics or ideology or trusting entirely in a single, secular leader. It’s only when your meaning has been secured that you can allow politics to be merely procedural.”
Honorable Mentions:
- Ruth Franklin, Stacy Schiff, The Art of Biography №6 (The Paris Review)
- Nellie Bowles, A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley (The New York Times)
- Susan Orlean, Growing Up in a Library (The New Yorker)
- Cambell Robert, A Quiet Exodus: Why Black Worshipers Are Leaving White Evangelical Churches (The New York Times)
- Kevin Williamson, Advice for Incels (The National Review)
- Kate Julian, Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex? (The Atlantic)
- Mary Eberstadt, The Zealous Faith of Secularism: How the Sexual Revolution Became a Dogma (First Things)
- Samuel James, The Public Square Is about Parenting (Mere Orthodoxy)
- Samuel James, Look Up, Child (Letter & Liturgy)
- Farhad Manjoo, For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned. (The New York Times)
- L. M. Sacasas, Audience Overload
- Alan Jacobs, How Change Happens (Snakes and Ladders)
- Marvin Olasky, Between Anywhere and Somewhere: An Afternoon with U.S Sen. Ben Sasse (WORLD)
- How Melvyn Bragg made high culture highly popular (The Economist)
- John Koblin, Conan O’Brien’s Unrequited Fanboy Love for Robert Caro (The New York Times)
- Andrew Ferguson, Barbara Bush’s Subversive Secret to Happiness (The Weekly Standard)
- Andrew Peterson, Wrestling the Giant: Why I Deleted Instagram (The Rabbit Room)
- Sam Haselby, Look up from your screen (Aeon)
