Consuming 2025

Make way, my friends — I’ve got a truckload of accolades to shovel out. The aim, as ever, is to highlight a few of the things that made it worth braving our increasingly “optimized for engagement” mediascape this past year. (Ugh, that phrase). How hopeful it is to report that the list is long.

Tunes

Two main themes informed my music listening in 2025. First, this was the year we lost eternal Beach Boy Brian Wilson, AKA the Great Genius of American Pop Music and my personal artistic hero. I’ve paid tribute elsewhere, but it’s never sufficient. I’m proud of this interview I got to do with Dan Koch right after he died, and I stand by this playlist of songs from his final 20 years. What a privilege to have been alive while Brian was still making work.

Second, 2025 witnessed an explosion of top-drawer “devotional music.” I borrow that designation from Jon Guerra, whose masterpiece of a record Jesus came out in April. Doubtless he’d have a smart way of describing what distinguishes the genre from religious music more generally, but I’d say it has something to do with DIY values and a comfort with (and commitment to) the less sunny elements of faith and/or the human experience. Devotional music, from what I can tell, is actively disinterested in the aesthetic and theological parameters that most people associate with contemporary Christian music. Basically, it’s good.

I figured Guerra’s record would easily be the top release of the year until a friend hipped me to John Van Deusen’s jaw-dropping As Long as I Am In The Tent of This Body I Will Make a Joyful Noise Pt. 1, which I’ve had on repeat ever since. Then our friend Andy Squyres released a pair of brilliant EPs, and all of a sudden my Spotify Wrapped had nearly as much explicitly religious content as nonreligious. Wild times.

Mockingbird Song of the Year: “Miracle Service” by Andy Squyres. If anyone anywhere wrote a better set of lyrics this year than what Andy came up with for the bridge of this one, I haven’t heard them. I consider it the greatest honor that he invited me to update his Spotify bio.

Mockingbird Record(s) of the Year: Tie between Jesus by Jon Guerra and As Long as I Am In The Tent of This Body I Will Make a Joyful Noise Pt. 1 by John Van Deusen. Again, this is not just fantastically inspired “devotional music,” it’s fantastically inspired music, period. This bodes well for all sorts of things in all sorts of ways.

Top Five Non-Devotional Records Released in 2025: Lovely Stuff by the Smoking Popes, Billionaire by Kathleen Edwards, More by Pulp, This Side of the Island by Hamilton Leithauser, and Always Been by Craig Finn

Best Concert, Britpop Reunion- or Otherwise: Pulp at the Anthem

Here’s a playlist of my 24 Favorite Songs Released in 2025. And here’s a playlist of 16 Favorite Songs Discovered in 2025.

Screens

Grace-in-Practice TV of the Year: Task, no contest. What’s this I hear about a second season?!

Single Most Abreactive Episode of TV: “Eulogy” from Black Mirror. Brilliant premise, staggering amounts of sentiment, and just so well done.

Television So Funny I Laugh Just Thinking About It Months Later: The Rehearsal, season 2, especially episodes 3 and 6. Runner-up would be The Chair Company.

Mockingbird Movie of the Year: Duh. Anything else would be a pose.

Honorary Amblin All-Ages Feature of the Year: Sketch

Top Seven Other Favorite Movies Released This Year: Eddington; Weapons; One Battle After Another; Sorry, Baby; 28 Years Later; Superman; and The Ballad of Wallis Island. A very good year at the cinema!

Favorite Older Movie Watched This Year: Midnight Run

Accidental Saint Documentary of the Year: John Candy: I Like Me. Runner up would be Part Five of Mr. Scorsese.

Documentary I Haven’t Been Able to Shake: The Age of Disclosure

Favorite Podcast Not Hosted By Us: The Rest Is History, favorite episode this year being “The Lion, the Priest and the Parlourmaids.” Runners-up would be Heavyweight, Dopey, and Christian History Almanac.

Pages

Book of the Year: The Science of Revenge by James Kimmel Jr. Fresh, penetrating, and incredibly well researched, I haven’t read a book this helpful to the Mockingbird project (or ministry itself) since Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. Essential in both diagnosis and prognosis. I’m s0 excited that James will be joining us in NYC this spring!

Full-Length God Writing of the Year: Evangelism in an Age of Despair by Andrew Root. “A world like ours — filled with sad happiness-seekers in misery who are stuck in their self-imposed châteaus of fragile authenticity — needs evangelism and ministry not as polemics but as consolation, not as arguments but as visions of how sorrow itself is shared by God and brings peace and mercy.” Amen.

Short-Length God Writing of the Year (Yet Again): The Red Hand Files by Nick Cave, especially this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one.

Favorite Way Overdue God Writing Discovery of the Year: Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle. “It may be that we have lost our ability to hold a blazing coal, to move unfettered through time, to walk on water, because we have been taught that such things have to be earned; we should deserve them; we must be qualified. We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift. But a child rejoices in presents!”

Most Indispensable Newsletter For Anyone Trying to Understand Our Cultural Moment: GIRLS by Freya India. She’s in a league of her own. That “Nobody Has a Personality Anymore” entry alone! Love me some Millinerd too.

Top Single Substack, Religious or Otherwise: “Numb at Burning Man” by Sam Kriss

Most-Cited Columnist on The Mockingcast: Ellen Cushing (e.g., “Americans Need to Party More”)

Favorite Novel I Read This Year: Middlemarch by George Eliot. “As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.” “It is surely better to pardon too much than to condemn too much.” “Life wants padding.” And so on and so on and so on x 1000000. Runner up would be Random Harvest by James Hilton.

Top Five Long Reads of the Year: “The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’s Death Row” by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker, “Witness” by Elizabeth Bruenig in the Atlantic, “High and Dry” by Barrett Swanson in Harpers, “The Pain of Perfectionism” by Leslie Jamison in the New Yorker, and — why not? — this one in Plough.

Favorite Testimonies Not Published by Us: “The Telephone of Life” by Kazusa Okaya, “Ed Kochanowski’s Wars” by Kevin Cullen, and “The Strange Love of a Strange God” by Esther Maria Magnis. That story Judd Apatow told about meeting Jesus on ayahuasca was pretty rad, too.

Favorite Testimonies Published by Us: “Exponents of Falsehood” by Jason Micheli and “A (Reluctant) Living Testimony” by Amanda Geisinger. What a privilege!

Must-Listen Interview of the Year: Paul Kingsnorth talking to Russell Moore. Come for the scary if undeniably cogent take on AI, stay for the humble testimony and absurdly elegant command of the English language. I also really appreciated Ezra Klein’s conversations with Oliver Burkeman and Patti Smith.

Most Personally Helpful Theology Substack Series: The Moral, The Existential, and the Ontological (Pts 1–11) from Richard Beck

Most Awesome and Unexpected Gracebomb of a Comic Book: Absolute Batman Annual 1 by Daniel Warren Johnson

Jokes

Favorite Instagram Feeds: Can’t get enough of These Guys or This Guy. Also wernerherzogofficial and Troy Hawke, esp the sidewalk stuff.

Favorite Instagram Reel: James Donald Forbes McCann’s “Outback Steakhouse,” or maybe that montage of guys calling friends to tell them goodnight.

Most Consistently Devastating Instagram That’s Also Very Funny: Meditations for the Anxious Mind (favorites being Therapy Culture, Why Everyone’s Running Now, Left Wing Academics, and LinkedIn Warriors)

YouTube Clip That Makes Me Laugh Every Single Time: Jim Downey’s bit about Epstein

Top Onion Headlines: “Unconditional Love Given to 15-Year-Old Who Just Called Mom a Bitch in Middle of Hollister,” “Grandma’s Hospice Has Shitty WiFi,” and “Report: Girlfriend Probably Reading Some Book Called ‘The Midwife’s Promise’” (Bonus discovery: “Mom Hasn’t Ordered Favorite Pizza Topping in Over a Decade“)

Top Hard Times Headlines: “The Art of Forgiving Yourself for Your Mistakes While Holding Other People’s Against Them Forever” and “New Study Finds That Everything You Thought Was Three Years Ago Was Eight Years Ago”

Top Reductress Headlines: “Crisis Averted! Successful Peer Is Two Years Older Than You,” “Push Up More Push Than Up,” and “Why I Stopped Being Anxious About Things Outside of My Control and Started Being Depressed About Things Within My Control”

Favorite Comedy Skits/Shorts: SNL’s “Plans,” “UberEats Wrapped,” Nate Bargatze’s Nativity Scene, John Mulaney’s sit-down with Bubbles the Chimp

Favorite Comedy Special: Mike Birbiglia’s The Good Life

Favorite Cartoonist: Asher Perlman, naturally, but also Ivan Ehlers if only ’cause of the one he did about the Pearly Gates