Ten Notable Articles from 2025
As is tradition at our magazine, senior editor Jonathan Church offers his selections of the ten articles published in 2025 that most deserve to be reread and reconsidered.
This article tops my list as an exceptionally well-crafted retrospective on a tragic suicide that encapsulates the “year of the plague,” when the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic spread worldwide, mass protests over the murder of George Floyd filled American streets, and Kyle Rittenhouse ignited yet another incendiary national debate about the Second Amendment. In May of 2020, outside a bar in Nebraska, “Jake Gardner killed James Scurlock on a street in Omaha and, shortly thereafter, killed himself,” as Matt Chabin writes in this Spotlight essay.
Chabin navigates the complexities of competing narratives around this seismic event with the meticulous attention to detail of a virtuoso investigative journalist and the literary mastery of an essayist of exceptional craft. He highlights the excesses of “woke mobs” and the weaponization of social justice ideology without losing sight of the genuine and deeply felt concerns about social injustice that were widespread at the time. The detached yet intimate attention to nuance and detail, coupled with an empathy that emerges from his personal history with Jake Gardner, gives this illuminating piece the air of a profound retrospective that reaches into the realm of the timeless. It transcends the cacophony of commentary that prevailed as events unfolded in real time.
This pointed editorial by Merion West editor-in-chief Erich J. Prince illuminates one of the most enduring concerns animating citizen cynicism about the integrity of politicians. Prince traces the surprising speed with which a newly elected Congressman from northeastern Pennsylvania—Rob Bresnahan—succumbed to the culture of graft that many see as endemic to Washington, D.C. Entering Congress in 2025 with a net worth of approximately $48m, Congressman Bresnahan became the second most active stock trader in Congress a year after he argued for the necessity of banning members of Congress from trading stocks.
Prince asks,
“Why would a young man who has, against the odds, received the incredible opportunity to serve in one of the nation’s two federal legislative bodies not do everything in his power to avoid even the appearance that he might be trading based on privileged information?”
It is a question many Americans are asking, and this essay gets to the heart of populist concerns about the integrity of our government.
Free speech has a mystical status in American society as a fundamental right without which the United States would lose its identity as a country that champions freedom. But legal scholar Eric Heinze reminds us that the First Amendment’s injunction is directed only at Congress. As the amendment states, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech.”
Heinze writes:
“As such, the First Amendment says nothing about the individual states’ regulatory power, though, in those days, it was primarily the states that supervised everyday speech….Contrary to widespread belief that speech in the United States has always been ‘free,’ state and local governments [have always] enjoyed a wide margin of discretion.”
The extent to which the Supreme Court of the United States has permitted government restrictions on free speech has waxed and waned over time. Heinze provides a clear and well-anchored categorization of four periods in American history characterized by greater or fewer restrictions on speech. While opinions on free speech often appear to be matters of common sense, Heinze demonstrates why common sense is not necessarily good sense. For a topic that energizes and enrages many, he offers a concise and expert tour of the complexities underlying debates about free speech.
In a year in which institutions soured on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in both government and the private sector, investment agendas driven by broader Environmental, Social, and Governance concerns have also been in retreat. As Merion West publisher Henri Mattila notes:
“...[a]ccording to an analysis by Bloomberg earlier this year, mentions of climate- and ESG-terms on S&P 500 earnings calls are down by three-quarters versus three years prior.”
In this interview with Eventide Asset Management founder Robin John, Mattila engages John on the notion of values-based investing. In this paradigm, value is conceived not strictly in dollars and cents but also in faith-based principles oriented toward making the world better, not merely enriching shareholders. Mattila writes that John and his co-founder envisioned an investing firm whose goal was not limited to maximizing returns but to improve the world itself. John explains:
“In the same way that a person might reject a lucrative opportunity to work for a company that trades in cigarettes or X-rated content, he should treat his investments with similar discernment.”
It is reassuring to learn more about investors for whom the value of investing extends beyond counting dollars and cents. In John’s own words:
“As a Christian adviser, you owe it to your clients to discuss how their investments align with their faith. If you don’t, they might hear about it from another adviser and wonder why you never brought it up.”
This essay offers a well-researched dive into the social and economic ramifications of Germany’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including its pledge to increase military spending to more than 2 percent of gross domestic product. The moment marked a break from decades of fiscal restraint and pacifism. Germany committed to fiscal expansion through a €100 billion investment in its military. Similarly, in March of 2025, the European Commission committed €800 billion to building up Europe’s defense capabilities.
Ioannis Mademlis provides a detailed historical breakdown of how this came about and what it means. He also shows how this development parallels a path Germany followed from 1929 to 1941, while acknowledging the enormous ideological and political differences between the two periods:
“The EU's transformation between 2009 and 2025 was a shock-induced turn from austerity to defense spending, structurally echoing the path that Germany followed from 1929 to 1941.”
For readers drawn to economic and political history, this essay is a tour de force examining one of the most consequential shifts on the European continent following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
There are numerous myths about life in prison, some grounded in reality and others not. Of all that I have learned about life in prison in my own research, I have rarely, if ever, encountered a story about a prisoner, confined behind the walls serving a 63-year sentence, finding true love with a woman on the outside and proposing to her during a birthday party set up by video conference. Antoine Davis tells this story in the understated tone of one who lets the story speak for itself. It is not maudlin or oversold but, rather, told with a heartwarming touch that humanizes the life of a man who we are prone to ignore and even condemn as one whose criminal past has made him irredeemable.
While incarcerated, Davis pursued education, receiving certification in Christian Leadership from the Urban Ministry Institute. He is now a licensed pastor for Freedom Church of Seattle and the Inside Director of Organizing for Look2Justice, where he facilitates civic education for system-impacted community members. He plans to apply for clemency, hoping his efforts to turn his life around will be recognized.
While we must never forget the victims of crimes committed, this essay suggests that a purely punitive approach to justice overlooks the real potential for rehabilitation—especially when dealing with prisoners who have matured and learned to express love and creativity through what they have rather than resenting what they do not.
This exceptional essay is notable for the depth and breadth with which it engages with the Western canon to illustrate how “the stories that fill the boundless canvas of Western canon are, in essence, reflections of two contrasting Homeric archetypes.” Namely, the clash, or conflict-centered narrative arc of the Iliad, and the quest, or journey (per the Odyssey) in search of a destination, a “narrative of survival” that “recognizes an unlimited scope to the protagonist’s journey.”
Alexander Zubatov carefully demonstrates the nature of this dichotomy through a ponderous exploration of many classic works in the Western canon, and then, fittingly, concludes that,
“...the distinction between the conflict-driven Iliadic Clash narrative and the endless-pursuit-driven Odyssean Quest narrative that I have here labored to delineate, breaks down in practice and goes the way of any such binaries. Great works—their beginnings, their trajectories, their governing principles and their endings—are ambiguous things, and the more ambiguous the greater.”
This beautiful essay perceives a transcendent and timeless theme in Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind that all too often goes unappreciated by reductionist critiques of its depiction of racial stereotypes, its portrayal of the antebellum South as a society characterized by honor and chivalry, and its seeming attempt to preserve “Lost Cause” mythology. While these critiques are justified, Sadhika Pant reminds us that the novel is ultimately a love story. In so doing, she perceptively illustrates how the two central protagonists, Scarlett O’Hara and Ashley Wilkes, personify a perennial contrast in human societies between efficiency and idealism, between utility and aesthetics, between, as she writes, “problem-solving and meaning-making.”
Scarlett is a woman who is thrust into survival mode during and after the war, and she thrives because she “claws and scrapes and breaks where she has to, and when the war swallows up all the lace and laughter of her world, she puts on boots and goes to work.” In short, Scarlett is a woman who “keeps the stove warm.” Ashley is a man thrust into the war as a soldier and arrives home after the defeat of the South as an equally defeated man. “Full of poetry and sighs,” Pant continues,
“[Ashley] belongs to the world that used to be—the one with music after dinner and hands that never knew what a plow felt like. He walks through the ashes of the old world carrying a book of verses and no map for the new one.”
Pant, however, does not choose sides. She incisively captures the tensions in the contrast and argues that, ultimately, society needs both Scarlett and Ashley:
“A society that values survival but forgets beauty risks becoming efficient but soulless. Conversely, a society that clings to aesthetic ideals but ignores the demands of survival becomes impotent.”
In this gritty and soul-searching reflection on the death of Pope Francis, Joe Weil offers us an assessment of the late pope as one who was a flawed but genuine servant of God. Weil complains that Pope Francis’s attempt to present himself as a humble servant of the people “did not escape the performative.” But Weil still loved and embraced Pope Francis as “my pope” in defiance of “right-wing Catholics who made Francis out to be the Antichrist and urged disobedience.” While he expresses his doubts on the depth of Pope Francis’s sincerity as a man of the people, Weil concedes that the late Pontiff's last appearance on Easter Sunday “was no performance—except if one thinks about him as a dying man, less than 24 hours from death, still trying to do his job. That showed truth of both lowliness and majesty. The man showed up and did his job.”
Weil makes a moving case that the poor and lowly revere majesty more than “folksy” bourgeois condescension. The Church and Pope Francis fell short to the extent that they failed to understand the importance of the sublime as a pillar on which the poor and lowly can rest their faith. Nevertheless, Pope Francis showed up at his last Easter Mass, in all the majesty of a man doing his sacred job. When Francis died, Weil wrote, “I felt true grief. I went to the adoration chapel and prayed a rosary for his soul.”
In a characteristically erudite and thoughtful essay on perhaps the most protracted conflict in the world today, Seamus Flaherty takes us through a lengthy but expertly detailed assessment of the claims that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, as well as the historical context underlying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The essay was notable not so much for the provisional conclusions it reaches as for the care with which Flaherty collates a voluminous trove of information from his own research into a coherent and insightful narrative of a heart-wrenching saga that seems to have no end in sight. In a world where attention spans are short and soundbites and social media tirades masquerade as serious thinking, this essay provides us with an excellent opportunity to exercise the commitment and concentration of which we are still capable. This is especially important for understanding a historical conflict so easily susceptible to the glib claims of rhetorical excess.
