2022 in Review

My year in writing

Thank you all, my readers, for making this another remarkably successful year here at the Substack. With your generous support, Further Up continues to grow steadily. E-mail open rates have been consistently above average for Substack newsletters, a sign of an exceptionally engaged reader base. I’m proud to have grown such an eclectic and intelligent audience, and I hope your ranks will only swell in the coming year. There’s still time to lock in an annual subscription for $30, considerably reduced from the usual $50. Meanwhile, here’s a little month-by-month look-back at my year in writing.

In January, Carus Books published my essay “Missing God: Jordan Peterson and the Decline of Atheism” as part of its debut anthology in the new “Critical Responses to…” series. This essay may be my personal best distillation of the Peterson phenomenon and what it’s signified to me in the broader landscape of religious dialogue. It was a pleasure and an honor to return to the territory that gave me my first real boost as a writer, having grown both in my understanding and my writing skills. Preview the essay here.

I also kicked off the new year by opening a byline at National Review, with a little essay on who’s to blame for an abortion, and the ethical/legal complexities involved in the answer. You can read it with National Review Plus, along with my subsequent articles on topics as varied as gay parenting and surrogacy, Fox News and transgenderism, barstool conservatism, and the box-office failure of Billy Eichner’s Bros. My thanks to Jack Butler for being such a great editor. Hopefully next year I’ll write something there that’s not paywalled!

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine swept me up as it did everyone else, and as things progressed I occasionally wrote about it. I am no foreign policy expert, nor do I play one on TV, and so I implore my readers not to take me for one. However, I didn’t make a secret of the fact that my early sympathies were with Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people, and that the corrosive cynicism of a Tucker Carlson was off-putting to me. At the same time, I would hardly call myself a war hawk in general, and I’m certainly not blind to the layers on layers of complexity that have built up as the war and the year have worn on. It would seem that many different things have proven to be true at the same time, and that this has proven difficult for people on each side to process thoughtfully. Meanwhile, I’m still pleased with the three Stacks I wrote against cynicism, against enmity, and for heroism.

Of much more niche interest, but maybe still interesting to a few, I did some ressourcement for North American Anglican at the intersection of Anglicanism and gay history with a two-part review of the anonymous 1970 work Letters of a Homosexual Christian (or, depending on the edition, The Returns of Love). Part 1 is here, Part 2 here. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t what I found. A haunting work that I’m still turning over today.

In February, I published a little poem called “Gloria Patri” at Agape Review, which I originally published several years ago right here at the Stack. I’m very slow to produce new poetry, but I think this piece has held up well.

In spring, I celebrated the Substack’s first anniversary. If you’re a newer reader and you’re curious enough to dig into my older work, this post marked some of my personal best work up to that point. I keep reminding myself that I actually began this project while still under my pen name, then chose in the fall of last year to uncloak. A decision whose full ramifications are yet unknown to me, but I still don’t regret it!

In May, I published an essay on the Uvalde shooting, “There Are No Solutions,” that quickly became one of my most-read. I still heard from people months later that this piece had struck a chord. I still stand by every word.

Also in May, I published one of my most personal long essays, “The Mother’s Mother’s Tale,” which tells the strange and remarkable story of how my mother was adopted when her birth mother chose life. It’s an essay I’ve since wondered whether perhaps I should have saved and published properly somewhere. But I don’t think I regret having published it here, in the end, because I was free to tell the story exactly the way I wanted to. It was very fitting that I should have written it in the year when Roe vs. Wade fell, even though, ironically, my mother’s mother likely did not celebrate that fall. Nevertheless, I hope I have honored her and her memory by simply presenting her history as it was. As I sat with old e-mail records, I felt that aching inexorable pull that all of us feel whose lives are bound by blood to men and women we never met. The gift of life was borne in upon me more intensely than ever before—life in general, and my life in particular.

Speaking of the fall of Roe vs. Wade, I marked that occasion in June here, in an essay that some of my eclectic readership no doubt appreciated more than others. I ate an appropriate amount of humble pie that month, as someone who had always been pessimistic that these winds would ever shift. Never have I been happier to be wrong.

In July, I got a small taste of the old Twitter regime as a mob of angry activists descended around this essay I gave to First Things on the plight of de-transitioners. I wrote a follow-up piece at American Reformer on how my Twitter account was temporarily suspended as various (non-hateful) tweets of mine were reported as hate speech. Happily, the people whose opinion actually mattered were glad that I had written the piece. Whatever a post-Elon future holds for Twitter, I fervently hope we never go back to the days when writers are muted for speaking out against the human rights violation that is trans affirmation surgery.

This month also saw me open a byline at World Opinions, a fast-growing op-ed page for World magazine. Readers interested in very short-form Christian opinion journalism might appreciate my work in that context, where my beats have included mass shootings, the masculinity crisis, celebrity worship, and Christian cultural engagement.

End of summer brought the beautiful fulfillment of a dream to travel to the UK. I dug into my savings and sprang for a ticket to Scotland, land of my forefathers, where I investigated the records of an old parish and the beloved battlefield priest who carried its torch as a chaplain into the hell of World War I. For those who haven’t followed the little journey of this project with me, I have been gradually pulling together this priest’s unpublished war letters, which stand as a remarkable historical record of a remarkable saint. Meeting the archivist who has charge of the primary source documents was deeply moving, as he was deeply encouraged to know that a young historian is coming to pick up where he leaves off. Thanks to a very gracious host family, this was an experience I will treasure forever, and I tried to capture some of it in writing for you all in a series of postcards here, here, here, and here. For various reasons, I was not able to meet my optimistic goal of finishing the manuscript this year, but now that the last pieces have fallen in place, I have good hope that this labor of love will finally see completion next year. You can enjoy a brief introduction I did for The Critic here, as well as some meditations on visiting the grave of David Hume.

In September, I published a long essay for Plough that will have niche interest for some of you, on the 20th anniversary of the death of Christian folk singer Rich Mullins. This is one of the essays I was most proud of this year, attempting to do the impossible and sum up a man who, in my own words, “seemed equal parts Francis Schaeffer, Bruce Springsteen, and Norm Macdonald.” A personal best for me as a writer, and hopefully a fitting tribute to a remarkable character.

Also in September, the death of Her Late Majesty the Queen prompted much reflection on all that was lost with her. I added my own reflections on the funeral, whose pomp and ceremony moved me even as I knew I was witnessing the “last post” for a lost age, as Paul Kingsnorth so memorably phrased it.

In October, I wrote about Canada’s growing assisted dying regime in a long essay for paid subscribers that seemed to strike a chord with many. Since then, more attention has been rightly paid to this appalling stain on Western civilization. For an especially thorough treatment, I commend this terrifying new deep dive from The New Atlantis, which exposes the sheer scale of the corruption that is signing death warrants in their tens of thousands.

Also in October, I placed a little more poetry at North American Anglican, which editor Dan Ratelle generously described as “an aulde-fashioned valediction.”

Beginning of December, my talented friend Ben Sixsmith graciously gave me an interview on his Substack where I got to talk about pretty much everything, including my origin story, religion, politics, Jordan Peterson, and the best argument for Christianity. Ben is not a Christian, but I’m working on him.

A bit later in the month, Carus Books published the Kindle edition of its second “Critical Responses” volume, this one on Sam Harris, where I wrote one essay and co-wrote another. Find a preview here. I also reflected on the arrival of ChatBot in another personal favorite piece drawn from my experience as a high school teacher (subscriber-exclusive). Meanwhile, for people who were curious to know if I had any thoughts around the Respect for Marriage Act, I certainly did, just never realized my plans to put them together in a Stack. Perhaps next year. However, I did use the occasion to write a short World Opinions take on pluralism and the place of Christian sexuality ethics in the new public square.

For pure fun, I contributed a little piece on seeing the Blind Boys of Alabama in concert to the debut of Moonshine & Magnolias, a new magazine venture for fine Southern writing just launched by my friend Brandon Meeks. You can buy the single digital issue for $12 here.

Finally, I rounded out the year here at the Stack with a little more straight-forward apologetics writing than I typically do, giving my candid impressions of Tom Holland’s two-episode podcast special on the historical Jesus in three parts.

And that’s a wrap! I’ll sign off on a gently sad musical note with a little tribute to late Fleetwood Mac frontwoman Christine McVie, one of my personal favorite female vocalists/pianists. Her death prompted me to blow the dust off this almost ten-year-old cover I did of “Songbird,” back in my college days of messing about with a microphone in the basement. I’ve set it to some stunning bird photography by my very talented teenage cousin, who’s apparently such a perfectionist that half these photos would have been deleted if it wasn’t for my uncle. Enjoy! Happy New Year to all!