Current writers and editors conclude their reflections on favorite things from 2024! (And check out Part I and Part II)
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Jay Green
As the co-founder of a “little magazine,” I feel like something of a traitor to my class. Aside from journals that go by the name Current, I don’t feel like I spent a great deal of time reading many pieces in other “little magazines.”
Among my favorite pieces from Current in 2024 are Eric Miller’s “Please Walk on the Grass,” Chris Shannon’s “Whose Culture? Which Solidarity?” and Dan Williams, “Needed: A New History of Rural Working-Class Conservatism.”
I readily admit that the “big magazines” hold an inordinate proportion of my attention. This year I have been eager to read anything I can get my hands on written by Caitlin Flanagan, George Packer, and especially Tyler Austin Harper. But the most formative piece I think I’ve read in 2024 was Franklin Foer’s Atlantic March cover story, “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending.”
Another author I tried to read religiously in 2024 is Mere Orthodoxy’s Jake Meador, but I particularly benefited from his insightful musings on the state of my own denomination ahead of this past summer’s General Assembly. We are so grateful to have your voice in the PCA, Jake!
I am still thinking about veteran public radio reporter Uri Berliner’s devastating expose of the political echo chamber that has become today’s NPR. I hope NPR is still thinking about it too. I’d like to buy everyone who works there a copy of Musa al-Gharbi’s book on the “cultural contradictions” that govern the mindset of that place–and many others like it.
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Jon D. Schaff
As 2024 fades into the past, here are some of my favorites of the year.
There were some truly outstanding books released this year. Some books I found myself thinking about long after reading them. These would include Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation, Yuval Levin’s American Covenant, and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic by our very own Nadya Williams. My guilty pleasure is detective novels. To bring in something old, I started this year the Lew Archer series by Ross MacDonald. Set in post-World War II Los Angeles, these are outstanding examples of noir detective fiction.
I happen to think 2024 (so far) was a year of stinkers at the movies. I went to or streamed plenty of movies that I found boring or uninspired (I actually fell asleep during Gladiator II a few weeks ago). The best movies I saw were holdovers from the year previous that I caught early in 2024. Among these were, yes, The Holdovers, as well as American Fiction. We recently watched the new Dallas Jenkins version of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. It is exceptional family entertainment in that it is endearing without being saccharine. Truly a film everyone in the family can enjoy. I found Jerry Seinfeld’s Frosted to be a fun, silly movie, as was Twisters. We all need, every now and then, a movie that allows you to set your brain to “stupid” and just enjoy the film. In another throwback, my eldest son and I worked through all the Sean Connery James Bond films this year. These might be the epitome of the good stupid movie. I will say I am looking forward to the Bob Dylan picture starring Timothée Chalamet coming out soon.
This is not the age of feature film. It’s the age of television. The show Reservation Dogs wrapped up this year. I think it may be, over its three-season run, the best thing on television in recent years. I also continue to enjoy Only Murders in the Building, Dalgleish, and Slow Horses. The latter two are based on book series that I recommend to my fellow lovers of detective and spy fiction.
We are also living in the age of the podcast. The podcasts I listen to most regularly are the Commentary daily podcast, Russ Roberts’s EconTalk, and, of course, Mars Hill Audio, about which I wrote at length here. Late in the year I started watching Mark Halperin’s 2Way on YouTube. I listen to the first half hour of the morning update for which Halperin is joined by Sean Spicer and Dan Turrentine. I find it a good way to keep up with the day’s political news. I periodically listen to Honestly, the podcast by Bari Weiss and The Free Press. Two episodes were particularly good this year, namely Bari Weiss’s interview with Jerry Seinfeld from May and Eli Lake’s November piece “The Art of the Bullshitter,” which is the most insightful look into Donald Trump’s character I’ve yet come across.
Finally, there have been plenty of great online essays. There are so many to choose from, and I know I am likely neglecting some great pieces, but let me recommend F.H. Buckley’s “Our Embedded Liberalism,” “The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Liberalism” by Joshua Hren, and finally Matthew Crawford’s amazing essay, “Travelogue: Budapest and Croatia: Is Christianity Sexy.” Crawford is one of the great thinkers of our time.
This all comes with the caveat that the best essays are at Current. Thank you for reading. Happy New Year!
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Dan Williams
Many Americans are probably sick of politics at the end of this tumultuous election year, but I still find the subject fascinating – not primarily because I like reading about political candidates (although sometimes I do) but because I’m especially interested in what elections tell us about what Americans believe and who we are as a nation. Perhaps it’s not surprising, therefore, that my list of favorite reads this year features several books that provide fascinating insights into those important questions.
One of the best pieces of political wisdom that I found in this election season comes from Russell Moore’s article “Your Party Will Not Win This Election.” Moore argued that elections do not result in the political annihilation of the losing side, which means that no election can be ultimately definitive. If Americans entered this election cycle closely divided, they will continue to be closely divided, even if Republicans now have control of the government. That means that we will have to find a way to live peaceably with those with whom we disagree about politics rather than merely seek to defeat them.
In order to better understand our current political divisions, I read everything I could find on the new educational class divide that is reshaping American politics. David Brooks has long been fascinated by the cultural differences between red state and blue state voters, and he, too, has become convinced that education is a critical dividing line between red states and blue states. I therefore read with interest his November 2024 Atlantic article “How the Ivy League Broke America,” which explains how Harvard and other elite universities invented the current meritocratic educational system in the mid-twentieth century and why that system has left many people frustrated and angry.
I was especially intrigued by Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins’s Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics, which Cambridge University Press published in September. Most accounts of the recent “diploma divide” in American partisan voting behavior focus on the reasons why Americans without college degrees shifted to the right, a phenomenon that they usually attribute to working-class Americans’ frustration with the meritocratic system. In short, they usually offer an economic explanation for the new culture wars. But Grossman and Hopkins, political science professors at Michigan State University and Boston College, make a data-based argument that white college graduates have moved markedly to the left on cultural issues since 2010, and that that shift in both the Democratic Party and the larger culture has alienated socially conservative working-class voters and driven them toward the Republican Party. It’s an intriguing culturally based argument that is well worth considering.
The educational divide has driven both parties toward opposite extremes, according to Grossman and Hopkins. But since I’m not attracted to either extreme, I was impressed with the centrist, nuanced suggestions of Francis S. Collins in his new book The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust, which was published earlier this fall. I have been a fan of Collins ever since I read his book The Language of God, which he published nearly twenty years ago as a defense of both reasoned faith and scientific data. His book The Road to Wisdom offers the same defense of both Christianity and science, but this time, Collins is writing at a much more culturally polarized moment, so he offers a more thorough explanation of why we should trust empirically based scientific evidence and accept vaccines that have been proven to work while also being open to the evidence that leads us to faith in God. Part memoir and part reasoned defense of important principles, Collins’s book is a refreshing read for those who reject both the secularism of many on the left and the anti-science conspiracy theories of many conservative Christians on the right.
Collins credits his book partly to the encouragement of the late pastor Tim Keller, who urged him to write it. I think it’s therefore appropriate that my final book recommendation from works published this year is a new collection of short pieces from Keller’s writings: Go Forward in Love: A Year of Daily Readings from Timothy Keller. I own a similar 365-day collection of excerpts from C. S. Lewis’s works, and I have found that even though I have read most of the full-length works from which those short excerpts are taken, the new context of the 365-day arrangement reveals new insights that I overlooked before. The same is true of this new collection of excerpts from Keller. Even though I have most of Keller’s books on my shelf already and have perused them pretty thoroughly, I’m finding new nuggets of wisdom in the excerpts that are highlighted in Go Forward in Love. It’s the sort of book that will offer plenty of worthwhile devotional reading in 2025 – and it’s a good reminder that as interesting as the study of politics might be, it still can’t compare to the eternal truths that a book like Go Forward in Love points us toward.