Favorites from 2024

I would like to share a few of my “favorites” from the year. I figured one novel, one movie, and one work of theology would be a good format. These are not works produced or published in 2024, but works I read or watched in 2024 that I found particularly meaningful. I hope by limiting myself to three will make it feel less like a list and more like an invitation to engage with interesting works of art and scholarship.

Favorite Work of Theology

Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth by Bruce L. McCormack

If you’re subscribed to my substack, you have probably heard of Karl Barth. He feels inescapable for those interested in theology, even for those who are well outside the typical Protestant churches that have historically flocked to his theological outlook. Bruce McCormack is a noted—and controversial—interpreter of Barth’s theology. I find Orthodox and Modern is a compelling rendering of Barth’s theology.

The book is a collection of essays McCormack has published over the years that are collected into coherent whole. Though each essay could be read on its own, there is a logical structure to the work as whole. He teases out the state of Barth scholarship and proposes his own reading. McCormack puts Barth, as the title of the book suggests, squarely within the modern world (as the title of the book suggests). This does not mean Barth abandons orthodoxy, but reinterprets it in light of the intellectual developments that occurred in the preceding centuries leading up to Barth’s life. This cuts against much of English-speaking scholarship that has seen Barth’s rupture with liberal theology as a larger project of repristinating orthodoxy over and against modern thought.

Admittedly, I am predisposed to McCormack’s understanding of Barth. I have benefitted greatly from Schleiermacher’s theology and find the questions posed to Christianity by modernity to be worth investigating. I remember in seminary having a conversation with someone interested in Christianity, but unsure about it. They asked me some questions and I found that as I was talking with them, Barth was not informing many of my answers. I think this is due to my understanding of Barth being conditioned by more postliberal and postmodern accounts of his thinking. I wonder if reading McCormack before that interaction might have made Barth an informative partner in that conversation.

Favorite Novel

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

I had read Moby Dick a couple of years ago and returned to this novel after recommending it to a coworker. It feels silly of me to try and offer any unique insight into why this book is worth one’s time.

Moby Dick feels like a novel written as the United States drifts from its Calvinist-influenced past. To uneven results Melville is wrestling with an increasingly pluralistic country (on its way to a civil war), but the thought of providence, created order, and a critical eye for human nature still haunts the pages of Melville’s classic. The puritanism of early American colonization still seems to linger within imagination of America’s writers in the 19th century. This is a work of art that still regards the human will with some degree of suspicion.

Moby-Dick is certainly an odd work to be considered the great American novel. Considering how popular vigilante stories have been in American society for nearly a century (think of righteous gunslingers in Westerns, superhero movies, and even less straightforwardly vigilante films the center a hyper-competent protagonist), a work like Moby-Dick might be an important antidote to the cult of the individual savior.

Favorite Movie

Day of Wrath (1943) dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer

This one is maybe the most difficult to write about, largely because Dreyer’s handling of the early modern penchant for witch hunts is strangely neutral. Certainly one is shocked by the scenes of torture presided over by the church’s clergy. One can find a degree of sympathy with the elderly woman who pleads for mercy at what seems to be unfeeling judges. And yet, this is not a story of innocent victims. This is a not a Danish Crucible. It does seem as though the women practicing witchcraft are capable of accomplishing their ends. The film almost draws you into the world of early modern suspicion and paranoia.

This film does not feel like a liberal parable about the dangers of religious communities or tightly bound groups that can so quickly strip the individual of freedom and dignity. Nor is it a nostalgic story that defends and romanticizes the virtues of a bygone era. It is a haunting film that I found unsettling and has stuck with me.