Each day, as I settle onto my stool, place my coffee mug on my Scottish rugby coaster, adjust my desk height, and open my laptop, I pinch myself.
I’ve long been the annoying kid on the play ground asking what people are doing, why they’re doing it, and if I could join in. Now, as an ethnographer and journalist, I think it’s pretty crazy that I get to call my incessant drive to wonder “wait, but why?” a profession. What started as curiosity, turned into a hobby, then a blog, then a column, and then a full-fledged career. I couldn’t be more thankful.
I could not do it without you, the reader.
That’s why I crunch the numbers at the end of each year to see what stories resonated with you most.
This year took me to Tijuana, Mexico and Tampa, Florida, from Vaduz, Liechtenstein to Lampedusa, Italy. Working as Faith and Immigration Reporter for Sojourners, Europe Correspondent for Christianity Today, Senior Columnist for Interfaith America, Editor for ReligionLink and starting my Habilitation at Universität Bayreuth, I wrote about immigration and artificial intelligence, climate catastrophe and democracy.
Along the way, some stories caught your attention more than others. You clicked on and read through narratives of solidarity between Puerto Rico and Palestine, psychedelic-assisted spiritual care, a jazzy church plant in Berlin, a Lutheran church offering refuge to Muslim migrants in Los Angeles, and voters of faith who abstain from voting for religious reasons.
Thank you (once more) for reading along this way year. I am already working on the first stories of 2025 and I can’t wait to share them with you.
For some Puerto Rican Muslims, their faith imbues their solidarity with divine purpose. For others, it is solidarity that leads them to faith in the first place.
How new studies, therapies, and theological revolutions may lead to a breakthrough in the use of psychedelics for religious insight and remedial spiritual care.
Berlin Like Jazz
One part church plant, one part jazz project, Kiez Church (Neighborhood Church) in the multiethnic district of Wedding is led by Ali and Rich Maegraith, Australian missionaries who say they want to bring the gospel to the cosmopolitan city’s art scene.
That Europe may know
How church planters in Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany are meeting with success…and failure.
Background, related stories, sources and relevant resources for understanding how AI is already impacting the everyday realities of our spiritual lives.
Haunted lands, popular saints
How people of faith honor the dead along the US-Mexico border.
Interfaith dialogue in the wake of October 7, 2023.
Now, it houses 20 Mauritanian Muslims seeking asylum in the City of Angels.
Righting the American Dream
A review of Diane Winston’s Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision.
The religious “no” vote
Why some voters of faith boycott elections.