Each year we like to honor the best writing published elsewhere by small and large magazines as well as independent writers. We call these honors "the Eliot Awards" for T. S. Eliot, who was himself a great man of letters and whose work has influenced us here at Mere Orthodoxy in many ways.
I Didn't Know I Could Feel This Way by Freddie de Boer (published on Substack)
Freddie de Boer has been a favorite writer of mine for probably at least a decade. Earlier this year he and his wife had their first child, prompting de Boer to write this reflection on fatherhood, which captures both the difficulty and the glory of it in ways few pieces I have ever read do.
Inside America's Death Chambers by Elizabeth Bruenig (published in The Atlantic)
Elizabeth Bruenig strikes me as one of the most pervasively Christian public writers we have going today. In writing about Scripture, the Protestant theologian John Calvin likened Scripture to a set of spectacles we used in order to see the world. I doubt that a Catholic like Bruenig would necessarily appreciate my using Calvin to praise her, but if you want a writer who genuinely attempts to keep the truths of the faith so near, like one's glasses, that she can't help seeing all the world through them, I can think of few writers who exemplify that more than Bruenig. The heartbeat of her work has always been the necessity of mercy, yet a mercy that is not morally empty or indifferent to justice. Holding that all together takes immense talent, but Bruenig often lives up to the task and there are few pieces of hers where she does it better than this lengthy meditation on capital punishment.
The Goon Squad by Daniel Kolitz (published in Harper's)
This one comes with a content warning: It's an investigative piece on men who organize their entire lives around pornography and self-pleasuring. It's every bit as dark (and more) as that description would suggest. But I think it is an important piece for highlighting how easy it is in our cultural and technological moment for young men to lose themselves in incredible dark ways of life. As I have said before, we make it very very easy to destroy ourselves and actually quite difficult to be good.
The Brother I Lost by Megan McArdle (published in The Dispatch)
This is a mature and moving piece by McArdle, a contributing writer for The Dispatch, about the topic she could never discuss with her mother and about the brother she never met and never will meet now. It highlights the stakes of the abortion debate as well as some broader topics around sexuality and family life in a really compelling way which helps foreground the humanity of the unborn. (Disclosure: I am also a contributing writer with The Dispatch.)
What Trump Is Really Doing with His Boat Strikes by Phil Klay (published in The New York Times)
Klay's piece uses Augustine to frame the conversation around both the boat strikes themselves and about the way those strikes are being talked about in American politics and media. Its strength is that it succeeds in the same way that Bruenig's essay does, I think: The point is less to tell you what to think about a policy question and more to remind you of the profound dignity of each person and how that dignity should influence us as we consider not simply individual policies, but as we think more generally about the nature of justice and the power of the state.
Elizabeth Anscombe and the Bomb by Luis Parrales (published in The Dispatch)
The Right Has Forgotten Feeling by Freya India (published in First Things)
From State Craft to Soul Craft by Alexandre Lefebvre (published in Noema)
Punching Blind by Robert Joustra (published in Comment)
A Russian Novel Saved My Mind by Noah Kumin (published in Unherd)
Why the Pro-Democracy Center Can't Save America by Evelyn Quartz (published in Compact)
We Were Jesus Freaks by Trevin Wax (published in First Things)
The Risk of Gentleness: Welcoming the Baby I Did Not Want by Gracy Olmstead (published in Plough)
One to Zero by Charles Carman (published in The New Atlantis)
Internet Overexposure Syndrome by Katherine Dee (published in Comment)
Keep It Private by Anton Barba-Kay (published in Comment)
Content and Community by Ben Thompson (published in Stratechery)
Nobody Has a Personality Anymore by Freya India (published on Substack)
(This is partially a joke. It is also partially a recognition that Douthat is the best columnist we have going in the country, has been for a remarkably long time, and keeping him in his own category is a way to give the rest of us a chance.)
How Progressives Lost Their Story
Your Rivals Aren't Responsible for Mass Shootings
An Age of Extinction is Coming. Here's How to Survive
Why Is Christianity So Hard to Find in the Trump Administration?
The Liberal Order Can't Heal Itself
Taylor Swift's Latest Reinvention is Both Coarse and Conservative
Why the Euthanasia Slope is Slippery
Amy Coney Barrett and the Right's Elite-Building Problem
Neil Gaiman, 'Babygirl', and the Ethics of Social Liberalism