2024: A Year in Review
The year in writing
Substack seems to have once again sent a piece to my paid list only that was meant for the full list. Again please accept my apologies if this is hitting your inbox twice!
A very Happy New Year to all my subscribers. (And a happy ongoing Christmastide, from those of us who follow a liturgical calendar. It’s not over yet!) I’m so grateful for everyone who’s read, shared, and supported my work in any way over the past year. Those of you who were subscribed in 2023 might recall that I set a couple lofty 2024 goals for myself, which you may have noticed I didn’t meet. I’d entertained the idea of starting a conversations podcast, but I decided I would have neither the time nor the discipline to maintain it. I’ve also noticed that when writers I like move into the podcasting host’s chair, their own output declines significantly. One writer told me he feels like his podcast has hit a frustrating mid-range level of success, just big enough that he feels a responsibility to maintain it but not big enough to quite repay all the work it takes. This wouldn’t be ideal for me, needless to say. Still, I’ve gotten to know enough interesting people that I keep the idea in my back pocket.
2024 was a banner year for me on the Going Outside and Meeting People front. I’m generally a hobbit when it comes to travel, but I visited three new states in January alone, saw Europe for the first time in May (a dream-like week in the hills of Tuscany), then in June joined the Abigail Adams Institute for two summer seminars in Cambridge, Massachusetts. September was also my first time attending the Touchstone conference in Chicago. These various adventures gave me the chance to meet lots of people whom I’ve read or admired from afar online, none of whom disappointed in person. They also introduced me to lots of other like-minded people who care about important, permanent things. If you’re reading this because our paths crossed at one of these places, I hope for my part that I didn’t disappoint you!
I’ve also found some gainful employment that may require me to find a new posting balance in the new year and perhaps take the occasional outright hiatus where I pause subscriptions. It’s always been my goal as a writer never to chase headlines, never to churn out a take merely for the sake of saying something while everyone else is also saying something about something. For someone who practically lives online, this is an ever-present temptation. Since this was an election year, I wrote some more politically slanted work than usual, which might have annoyed some of you. I apologize for the annoyance and thank you for sticking with me.
With that, here’s a survey of some stuff you all liked, some stuff I liked, and some other work you might have missed, including articles that are only available to paid subscribers. I will be leaving my end-of-year/New Year’s sale open for the next couple of weeks as I take some time off and figure out a sensible 2025 work schedule, so if you’ve been hesitating over an upgrade, this is a last call to grab one and start browsing away. There should be something here for everyone.
First, a look back at five of the year’s most popular free Substack pieces, in no particular order:
The Passion of Jordan Peterson: Jordan Peterson is sort of the reason I’m here, in the sense that it was writing about Peterson that first caught people’s attention and began opening doors for me. That was around seven years ago, and while the Peterson train has slowed down, it’s still chugging along. I really enjoyed revisiting what initially drew me to his work and assessing where he is now, and apparently lots of you enjoyed it too.
We Are the Beast: I remember reading Matt Walsh before he was cool, so it’s been interesting to trace his trajectory from cranky blogger to cranky Daily Wire personality. This was my review of his new documentary Am I Racist? I liked it, but I liked it less than What is a Woman? Walsh himself didn’t seem to take my criticisms amiss and tweeted this out, thus giving it a place on this list.
How My Grandfather Destroyed the West: I’ve told my mother’s remarkable origin story before, from the perspective of her birth mother. This piece is about the man who, unfortunately, was her birth father. As I explain in the piece, he didn’t exactly destroy the West, at least not by himself, but inasmuch as he contributed to the Sexual Revolution, he provides an interesting case study. Call this piece my attempt to begin sketching a unified field theory of sexual revolutions.
No Country for Old Conservatives: This is the first time since becoming a widely read writer that I’ve systematically tried to lay out my philosophy of voting—or not voting, as case may be. In the Age of Trump, I recognize that I walk among the politically homeless. But there are worse things. The title says it all.
Francis Collins is Not Sorry Enough: I brought down the hammer with this one, and I’m not even a little bit sorry. Many of you told me I’d expressed exactly what you felt but couldn’t quite find the words for. It gives me special pleasure to repost this now as I look forward to the installment of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as Dr. Collins’ eminently worthy replacement. I don’t wish Dr. Collins ill. I simply wish him gone.
Before highlighting some of my personal favorites from the year’s archives, here’s a look at my outside-Substack work, which wasn’t quite as strong as 2023 in my judgment, but still a solid bushelful:
I’ve continued to contribute regular short takes to WORLD magazine’s opinions page, tending more political than the work I do here, although again I do my best to avoid the cheap route to clicks and find something actually new and helpful to say. My beats include life issues, LGBT activism, and Christianity and atheism in the public square. Sometimes WORLD gets the short version of something I’ve written about at more length here. Far too many pieces to highlight, but here’s my author page for curious browsers.
I wrote four pieces for First Things, on such varied topics as the strange relationship between C. S. Lewis and Janie Moore, why Hindu nationalists and Christians shouldn’t be friends, the book Shepherds for Sale, and the cancellation of school choice activist Corey DeAngelis.
I started a new byline at Fairer Disputations with a long read partly inspired by one of those aforementioned conferencey outings where I met Joe Burgo, a gay therapist who’s been cancelled for opposing trans activism. When he later wrote a piece about the underdiscussed tragedy of boys captured by the trans cult, it gave me a good catalyst to write a long-gestating article clearly laying out points of agreement and departure between conservatives and the “LGB without the T” crowd. It wound up being a whole gentle primer on the Christian sexual ethic. I wasn’t sure how Joe was going to receive it, but fortunately he was gracious and appreciative.
One of my favorite novels, A Canticle for Leibowitz, turned 65 this year. I was pleased and proud to write a well-received tribute for Joel Miller’s book review Substack. I’m a bit annoyed with myself that I didn’t also work up a 50th anniversary reflection on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but maybe I can do one this year and pretend it’s not late.
I placed a couple different pieces about my time spent protesting outside a Planned Parenthood in Lansing with Prisha Mosley, an outspoken detransitioner suing the doctors who destroyed her body with trans “health care.” It was a dispiriting day in some ways, but I was glad to be there, and it yielded some of the most important reportage I’ve done in my career. Here’s the National Review angle, the WORLD angle, and my full report here at the Stack.
Also at National Review, I joined John Miller for another episode of the Great Books podcast to discuss Watership Down, one of my all-time favorite novels. I wrote some more on the book for paid subscribers here.
I haven’t done anything in print for a while, but I was glad to get the chance to do so again for Davenant Institute’s new collection of essays on C. S. Lewis’s space trilogy, under the capable editorial eye of Rhys Laverty. Paid subscribers can enjoy a free preview of my piece “The Devil Went Down to Venus,” which explores the Christian’s love-hate relationship with his enemies. Not included in the preview are some thoughts applying the story to the present day, including reflections inspired by my eventful day with Prisha at Planned Parenthood.
Among my prouder quiet achievements this year, I wrote and published a little poetry, earning good feedback from some very encouraging editors. Here’s some light verse inspired by a charming young pizza king I saw on TikTok, and here’s some throwback war poetry about a chaplain’s nightly visits to a chapel memorial in Edinburgh (dedicated to Canon A. E. Laurie, whose war letters I’d planned to publish with a military history press before putting that project on the back burner—something I’d like to see if I can pull together this year). My best piece of the year, “Prayer of Thanksgiving,” was featured for the holiday at Joie de Vivre journal and will appear in a later print issue. I’ve also had another sonnet accepted for the forthcoming winter issue of New Verse Review, a competitive new formalist journal edited by Steven Knepper.
Now back to the Further Up archives. Some more free articles I’m especially proud of included this piece on our bronze-winning men’s gymnastics team at the Olympics, which was just pure fun and joy to write, this piece on why euthanasia and transhumanism are two sides of the same coin, this election-inspired reflection on friendship, political polarization, and the show Family Ties, this reflection on just war, the a-bomb, and Israel vs. Gaza, and this response to Paul Kingsnorth’s Erasmus lecture “Against Christian Civilization.”
For paid readers, I tend to reserve content that is more evergreen, less related to the news cycle or current topics. If you read me for long enough, this is the content where you’ll start to notice the recurrence of themes that are really close to my heart. Sometimes I can’t anticipate the connections that will come up. This spring, I wrote an essay on watching the total eclipse at a friend’s house in Ohio. This winter, after that friend had died from pancreatic cancer, I wrote a tribute to his life, braided together with thoughts on the death memoir Death Be Not Proud. Death, dying, and suffering rear their heads with maybe a little more frequency than average in my corner of things. If you’re a newcomer, you’ve been warned. Here’s a non-exhaustive list arranging some more topically organized samples from the year’s paid archives:
On suffering
The Last Race (on the last days of Eric Liddell)
On the nature of digital media
On life issues
Bring the Bastard Children Home (on abortion and rape)
Choice Devours Itself (on how liberal fantasies of autonomy can turn into nightmares that threaten the most helpless)
On the arts (a topic I’d like to visit more in 2025)
In Praise of Heteronormative Love Songs
On Christianity and atheism
Of Men and Angels (one of my favorites, diving into the “third man” phenomenon and Bret Weinstein’s idea of Christianity as “metaphorically true”)
Wrong, Rights, and Screams in the Night (on good versus evil and the law written on man’s hearts—in which I explain how Jordan Peterson and Tom Holland are each getting something right and something wrong)
The Case of the Four Gospels (Part I) (actually a free sample, but it kicks off a paid series on the historicity of the gospels)
The Case of the Four Gospels, Part II: Undesigned Coincidences
The Case of the Four Gospels, Part III: Unnecessary Clues
The Case of the Four Gospels, Part IV: Details, Details
But Now I See (on Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s New York encounter with Richard Dawkins)
Brave Old World (really about Christianity and paganism—title stolen/borrowed from Hirsi Ali)
On history
Never Again (inspired by my visit to the Holocaust Museum in DC)
A Martyr’s Lament (on the heroic life and martyrdom of Poland’s Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko, murdered by the communists 40 years ago this year)
Day of Days (on the 80th anniversary of D-Day)
The Old Man and the Cello (on the life of the great cellist Rostropovich)
And now, having hopefully supplied you with enough catch-up reading material to last you while I catch my breath, I wish all my readers as much joy as 2025 can bring you. L’chaim!
Pleased to have found you on Great Books and Substack.
Blessings in the New Year.