The end of all reads

To start the final roundup of the year, some Advent and Christmas pieces, first about Mary. Mere O writes about how Protestants can call the Mother of Christ blessed as we should, and DL shows what churches miss by neglecting the Magnificat. Also, a Catholic piece that I found interesting but not wholly convincing:
Matthew Y Emerson & R Lucas Stamps, MereO, The Seed of Woman: Mary Among the Protestants
DL Mayfield, WaPo, Mary’s ‘Magnificat’ in the Bible is revolutionary. Some evangelicals silence her.

Alexi Sargent, First Things, America for the Immaculata

Several pieces on the meaning and practice of Advent and Christmas:

Fleming Rutledge, Generous Orthodoxy, Observing Advent
Fleming Rutledge, CT, John the Baptist Points to the Real Hope of Advent
Fleming Rutledge, CT, Why Apocalypse Is Essential to Advent

Kaitlyn Scheiss, Christ & Pop Culture, Advent is Actually Quite Political
Amanda Wortham, Christ & Pop Culture, Of Dying Kingdoms and Newborn Salvation: Resurrecting Christmas in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot
Ian Paul, Psephizo, Once More: Jesus Was Not Born in a Stable

Julie Canlis, CT, The Incarnation Is the Rule, Not the Exception

A piece on Dickens's A Christmas Carol, one on It's a Wonderful Life, and one on both sandwiched in between:

Haley Stewart, Church Life Journal, The Sham Practice of Christmas
Gina Dalfonzo, CT, Mankind Was Scrooge's Business (And George Bailey's, Too)
K B Hoyle, Christ & Pop Culture, George Bailey at the Bridge: The Costly Virtue of It’s a Wonderful Life

Several lovely Christian personal essays:

Judy Wu Dominick, CT, I Told My Husband I Had Feelings for Another Man

Tabitha McDuffee, CT, We Were Women Comforted by Shared Pain

Tish Harrison Warren, CT, I Cremated My Unborn Son

Kate Bowler, NYT, How Cancer Changes Hope

DL Mayfield, The Curator, Prayer Walks

Edwidge Danticat, Plough, Dangerous Unselfishness: With Dr King in Haiti and America

Grey Maggiano, Medium, It Keeps Getting Worse

Something on my mind recently is about how to write about faith for a secular audience; here are several pieces that kind of do it, but never quite get there for me (McClay's piece is fine, but is a review of a book that doesn't get there for her):
BD McClay, The American Scholar, Of Faith and Tragedy
Joel Winkelman, Popula, Plenty to think about, not much to believe in

Peter Wehner, NYT, The Uncommon Power of Grace

Jonathan Merritt, The Atlantic, Lauren Daigle and the Lost Art of Discernment

I'd like to think that these pieces (as well as some of the personal essays above) communicate a little more of what I'd like to see:

James KA Smith, Image Journal, In Praise of Boredom

Sarah Hamersma, Comment, Editorial: Consumption Pharisees? On the New Minimalism

Sarah Dahl, Comment, Trading Brunch for the Eucharist
Laura Turner, NYT, Internet Church Isn't Really Church

Martyn Wendell Jones, Ekstasis, Sickness Unto Death

Some other theology pieces:
Jonathan Leeman, MereO, Evangelicalism, Christian Identity, and Church Membership
Trevin Wax, TGC, What Expressive Individualism Does to Sin

John Piper, Desiring God, What Is the Rapture?

Jessica Martin, Snakes & Ladders, The Four Last Things: Hell
Wesley Hill, Covenant, The Trinitarian Theology of Morning Prayer
Samuel Bray, Covenant, A Neglected Gem: The Sunday First Lessons in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer

Two pieces on liberalism's contradictions:
Jeffrey Bilbro, Front Porch Republic, Whose Nostalgia? Which Liberalism? Reflections on “Faith and Democracy in America”
Francis Wade, LARB, “The Liberal Order Is the Incubator for Authoritarianism”: A Conversation with Pankaj Mishra

Some international Christian news:
Ed Stetzer, WaPo, Slain missionary John Chau prepared much more than we thought, but are missionaries still fools?
Marc LiVecche, Providence, Give Asia Bibi Asylum, Now

Pastor Wang Yi, stevechilders.org, My Declaration of Faithful Disobedience

Two pieces on China's oppression of their Muslim citizens:

Philip Wen & Olzhas Auyezov, Reuters, Tracking China's Muslim Gulag
Dake Kang & Yanan Wang, AP, China’s Uighurs told to share beds, meals with party members

US Politics:
Chelsea Maxwell, Shared Justice, Finding Time to Care
Eliza Griswold, The New Yorker, Evangelicals of Color Fight Back Against the Religious Right
Catherine Rampell, WaPo, Is the GOP the law and order party? Not so much.
Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, The Democratic Party Wants to Make Climate Policy Exciting
Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, This is US politics. Are you triggered?

A stream of consciousness – first, a piece on American atomization, and how extreme politics steps in to fill the gap of community (Brooks); Sullivan takes this further, tying it to religion; Douthat also sees the connection with religion, and the resurgence in neo-paganism (though he doesn't think these are as tightly connected as some others); Phillips looks at connections between Nazi occult practices and alt-right spirituality; Kristian looks at Trump and his supporters' quasi-medieval ordering of the world; Rishmawy notes that we are not nearly so disenchanted as many have thought; Mariani shows some of the other cracks in the secular, which the Roman Church ties pretty distinctly to the rise of new spiritualities:
Arthur C Brooks, NYT, How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart
Andrew Sullivan, New York Mag: Intelligencer, America's New Religions
Ross Douthat, NYT, The Return of Paganism
Brian Phillips, The Ringer, The Magical Thinking of the Far Right
Bonnie Kristian, The Week, Trump's medieval sense of order

Derek Rishmawy, Reformedish, When You Sort of Miss Disenchantment

Mike Mariani, The Atlantic, American Exorcism

Technology:
LM Sacasas, The New Atlantis, How Facebook Deforms Us
Brian Phillips, The Ringer, The Cost of Living in Mark Zuckerberg's Internet Empire
Andrea M Matwyshyn, Wall Street Journal, The ‘Internet of Bodies’ Is Here. Are Courts and Regulators Ready?
Kara Swisher, NYT, Who Will Teach Silicon Valley to Be Ethical?
Ruth Whippman, NYT, Everything Is for Sale Now. Even Us.
Sophie Elmhirst, 1843 Magazine, Meet Alexa: inside the mind of a digital native
Siobhan Hegarty, ABC Religion & Ethics, Why your most personal moments are too personal for Instagram
Tim Milosch, MereO, Asynchronous Citizens: Addressing Flaws in Digital Citizenship

Technology-adjacent, one article on online shaming and one on civil discourse on the Internet:
Helen Andrews, First Things, Shame Storm
Kiley Bense, The Atlantic, Civil Discourse Exists in This Small Corner of the Internet

The big bug piece, and two theological responses (neither is really a response to the piece itself, but both worth reading in connection):

Brooke Jarvis, NYT Mag, The Insect Apocalypse Is Here
Jacob J Erickson, Religion Dispatches, Insecto-Theology: A Wake for our Planetary Commons
Norman Wirzba, ABC Religion & Ethics, Can we live in a world without a Sabbath? Rethinking the human in the Anthropocene

Two Baltimore pieces:

Leon F Pinkett III, Baltimore Sun, When will we value Baltimore's North Avenues like we do its Charles Streets?
Christina Tkacik, Baltimore Sun, Baltimore hopes to alleviate pain of jury duty with new quiet room featuring no movies and plenty of outlets

Loosely food-related pieces:
Matthew Singer, Willamette Week, Did a Rave Review Really Shut Down Portland Burger Bar Stanich’s? Maybe It Was the Owner’s Legal Troubles.
Kate Wagner, The Atlantic, How Restaurants Got So Loud
Catherine Nicholas, Popula, You've got yourself a chicken of the woods
Sarah Miller, Popula, Three people, two bottles of wine.
Jim Goodman, WaPo, Dairy farming is dying. After 40 years, I'm done.

Kendall Vanderslice, CT, Power in the Plate

Two on the modern musical landscape – on the shallowness of the worship industry, and how Facebook becomes a barrier for underground DIY venues:
Madeleine Davies, Church Times, Where next for contemporary worship music?
Liz Pelly, Logic, The Antisocial Network

Book Reviews:

Micah Mattix, Kirk Center, Poetry, Oblivion, and God
David Sessions, Commonweal, Left to Their Devices
Alan Jacobs, The Weekly Standard, The Question without a Solution
Eve Tushnet, The Week, What Memoir Reveals
Gina Dalfonzo, CT, There’s Nothing Sketchy About Cross-Gender Friendships in the Church

LM Sacasas, MereO, Book Review: The Power of Silence by Robert Cardinal Sarah

Clare Coffey, The Weekly Standard, Of Fairies and Dragons

Two reviews of These Truths and a Jill Lepore interview from a while back:

Casey N Cep, Harvard Magazine, True Lies
Scott Spillman, The Point, These Truths
Joy Horwitz, LARB, What Gets Saved and What Gets Lost: An Interview with Jill Lepore

Other reviews:
Alexandra V Cipolle, Bust, "Worlds Of Ursula K. Le Guin" Shows The Evolution Of A Wizard, Writer, And Feminist
DL Mayfield, Christ & Pop Culture, The Good Place Recap: Janet(s) (Season 3, Episode 10)
Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, The Incarnation of Ideas in Tom Stoppard's 'The Hard Problem'

Pieces on people:

Matthew Loftus, MereO, Savage Love: A Review of the Work of Elisabeth Elliot
Alan Jacobs, The New Yorker, Thomas Merton, the Monk Who Became a Prophet

Hannah Long, The Weekly Standard, The Steward of Middle-Earth

Drew Magary, GQ, The Last Curious Man

The miscellany:
Jen Manion, Public Seminar, The Performance of Transgender Inclusion
Wesley Hill, Spiritual Friendship, Gay Boys and Their Evangelical Parents
Karen Swallow Prior, The Atlantic, What Jane Austen’s 'Pride and Prejudice' Teaches Readers
Tim Wu, NYT, In Praise of Mediocrity
Erica Klarreich, Quanta Magazine, A Collector of Math and Physics Surprises
Alice B Lloyd, The Weekly Standard, Last Lines