The Year in Review
Highlights from Window Light in 2024
The year 2024 has been a difficult one for me personally, but the Window Light newsletter continued to grow and thrive. In this last post of the year, I wanted to bring together some of the highlights from the past year.
This year’s most viewed article was also the most recent: my reflections on the startling reactions to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione, both those viewing Mangione as a hero and those seeing the murder as a tipping point toward social disorder. I’m somewhat surprised this was the most read article of the year, but I’m glad it found an audience.
Perhaps my two favorite articles of the year were theological reflections on God’s involvement in our lives. The first tries to understand what it means when we pray to God for something and to dispel common misconceptions of prayer:
The second was written in response to the attempted assassination of presidential candidate Donald Trump, but the article is not really about Trump, but rather about the claim that God saved Trump from the assassin’s bullet. It’s a reflection on God’s activity in the world and sovereignty over Creation.
For the second year in a row, Window Light gave special attention to the Synod on Synodality which gathered in the Vatican in October. One of the notable aspects of this year’s meeting was the fact that Pope Francis had taken some of the most controversial issues, especially the ordination of women as deacons and the inclusion of LGBTQ persons in the Church, off the agenda of the Synod. Other issues like participatory decision-making and transparency in the Church, however, came to the fore. Back in August, I anticipated the importance of these issues, which had a prominent place in the working document written in preparation for the October gathering.
Even though certain issues were taken off the formal agenda of the Synod, that did not keep them from being discussed. Perhaps the most shocking thing to happen at the Synod was the lack of transparency regarding the working group tackling the issue of women’s leadership in the Church, including the question of ordaining women to the diaconate—what I called “Fernández's Fiasco,” in reference to Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, the Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the head of that working group. I covered the fiasco here:
As Window Light has evolved, it’s become clear that one of its important missions is to offer commentary on Vatican documents—some important, some simply interesting—that goes deeper into the theological issues than what is often found in the Catholic press. One of the most important documents to be issued by the Vatican this year was the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Dignitas Inifnita, on human dignity. I wrote several articles on the document. This article provides the most detailed account of how the document explains human dignity:
And here I tackled what is probably the greatest weakness of Dignitas Infinita: the decision not to wrestle with the Church’s own failures to respect human dignity over the centuries.
One of my favorite articles this year was an explainer on another document from the DDF providing new guidelines for evaluating the authenticity of apparitions and visions:
This is only a sampling of this year’s fare in Window Light. Of course, 2024 was an election year, so I covered the Catholic vote and also gave particular attention to the issue of immigration. Early in the year, I was critical of both the Biden administration and congressional Democrats for promoting immigration policies that would have been considered far right only a few years ago. During the presidential campaign, I challenged the US Catholic bishops to speak up more forcefully against anti-immigrant rhetoric—and in particular rhetoric scapegoating Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio—on the campaign trail. And since November’s election, I’ve urged the bishops to be prepared for potential “mass deportations” conducted by the incoming Trump administration.
This year I also launched the Window Light podcast. I re-published earlier interviews as podcast episodes and then released several new episodes with interviews with Jordan Denari Duffner, Paul Fahey, Kent Lasnoski, and Taylor Patrick O’Neill. The second season of the podcast will continue in the new year!
Of course, the success of Window Light depends on you, the readers, so thank you for reading and subscribing! Let’s continue to make Window Light a success in the new year.
