Current writers and editors continue to reflect on their favorite things from 2024! (And check out Part I)
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Eric Miller
FX’s The Bear has won awards as a comedy, but it’s comedy with a heart. In fact, it’s comic mainly in the deeper sense of the term, celebrating the possibility of a final good despite indescribable loss and folly. It’s also a kind of footnote to MacIntyre’s proposition in After Virtue that the practices that inhere in traditions hold the possibility of offering at least a piece of redemption.
Paul Simon, Seven Psalms (2023, reviewed by Tim Larsen here): In the midst of sudden and overwhelming grief, I turned to this album and found a profoundly human undercurrent of hope and strength, and the beauty of glory itself. That Paul Simon in his early eighties declares that “The Lord is my record producer” can only bring a smile.
Favorite etymological journey: trying to fathom the Gen Z use of manifesting.
Wendell Berry, “Wheeler Catlett Goes to Washington” (The Berry Center Journal 7 [2024]): Any time Berry puts Wheeler Catlett in the center of a story, it’s time to stand at attention and listen close. This story, with its closing transcendent turn, will linger for a long, long time.
Helmut Thielicke, Modern Faith and Thought (1990): Every page of this immense work bears the imprint of profound, and profoundly sympathetic, engagement with nineteenth- and twentieth-century theology. Thielicke’s reading of Schleiermacher in relation Descartes changed my way of thinking about far more than Schleiermacher; likewise his reading of Barth in relation to Hegel.
Bruce Cockburn, Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws (1979): Cockburn’s existential testament of a sacramental ontology in a Christian key elides any sense of distance between life on earth and the life beyond. His performance on the guitar is worthy of his (re)enchanting, all-suffusing vision. “Maybe to those who love it’s given to hear / Music too high for the human ear.”
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Elizabeth Stice
Favorite new/old author discovery: I have known about Patrick Leigh Fermor for a few years, but I hadn’t read his writing until this year. Now that I have finally picked up his books, I have not stopped. I raced through his trilogy about his walk across Europe in 1933/34: A Time for Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and The Broken Road. Now I highly recommend him and I am continuing to work my way through everything he has written.
Favorite new hobby: I am one of the many people who has picked up pickleball. It’s a lot of fun, great to play with others, and it’s a very welcoming community. Because the sport is still pretty new, you can show up and play without any experience and be very welcome, which adults really can’t do with any other sport.
Favorite totally unnecessary purchase this year: Ninja slush machine. Now I can make slushies when I have people over for parties and it’s fun and unexpected.
Favorite YETI: 10oz tumbler. People think it’s ridiculously small, but they’re wrong. It’s just right. It’s excellent for one cup of tea and people seem to be forgetting that cups and water bottles are refillable–not everything has to be huge.
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John Haas
Like Dorothy, I finally surrendered. My favorite thing of 2024 is Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso.” You heard me. I read about it before I heard it, last spring: a critic puzzled by the delightfully loopy line, “that’s that me espresso,” speculated it would be the song of the summer. It’s not really my music–I doubt I’m anywhere near the target demographic, and I don’t sit around listening to it, but it tickles my musicological propensities just knowing it’s there, so in a largely low, dishonest year, I’ll take it. It’s almost an answer song to Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” of 1937, though that means it would have to be intentional, which I very much doubt. Rather, both songs treat that phenomenon peculiar to youth, that moment when you’ve excited someone of the opposite sex and you’re both extremely gratified and already beyond it. Each song illuminates a small corner of what it is to be human like a flashbulb popping, and what more can we ask of art? Now, back to my pre-war blues…
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Nadya Williams
Favorite art exhibit of the year (and it was a year of several truly magnificent art exhibits and museum visits–including Pompeii at the Cincinnati Museum Center and Titanic at COSI!): “Mary Cassatt at Work” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was phenomenal, and it was a special delight to take my own little girl with me to see it (wrote more about it here).
Favorite American historian: still the same one!
Favorite new coffee-making device: the moka pot–a stove-top espresso maker. It’s so perfectly primitive, but it makes the best espresso imaginable, hands down.
Coming tomorrow: Current writers’ favorite essays of 2024 from other little magazines
So glad to see Helmut Thielicke mentioned. I read his three volume opus some 40 years ago and it was as they say mind-blowing. Best work of theology I’ve ever read, I think, at least for the person I was at the time, with the questions and obsessions I was dragging around (of course, he also taught me some new questions to ask). Really borderline life-changing. There’s two kinds of people in this world: those who’ve read Thielicke and those who haven’t.
John: What do you think about the video for “Espresso”?
I honestly have no deep thoughts about it, which I suppose is itself a critique: Great art–maybe even good art–should inspire deep thoughts. This video isn’t trying to be great art, about which some would say “fine, not everything needs to be,” but I would lean in the other direction: life is short, eternity awaits, if you have a platform, say something big. This video doesn’t do that, and as such fails by my lights. On the other hand, it’s quirky and funny and easy to watch, so I’m not going to go to (culture) war against it.