The Free Press

Welcome back to our America at 250 faith series, where Free Press writers reflect on belief, history, and the freedoms that shape American life. On Wednesday, Matthew Walther wrote about our country’s religious kaleidoscope—and the history that birthed it. Today, Rabbi David Wolpe reflects on how two very brilliant but very different religious writers—the Boston Brahmin Emerson and Polish Hasidic émigré Heschel—strike so many similar notes of American faith. There’s no better moment to bring these “Apostles of Amazement” into your life. —The Editors

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803 and raised within the liberal Protestant culture of New England. Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in Warsaw in 1907, scion of two Hasidic dynasties.

Emerson was born into his language, crafting sentences whose sturdy majesty shaped the American idiom. Heschel learned English as an adult yet he, too, grew into an extraordinary American writer. Emerson left his position as a pastor and became an independent lecturer. Heschel remained a devout rabbi his entire life, tied to an academic institution, producing books of scholarship in Hebrew and Yiddish as well as more popular works in English.

Welcome back to A Man Should Know, a weekly column from Elliot Ackerman about how today’s lost boys can become tomorrow’s good men. This week, Elliot shares lessons he himself didn’t learn until well into adulthood: the many rules of wearing a tuxedo.

I was into my 30s the first time I wore a tuxedo. Before that, I’d been in the Marines, and would wear my dress uniform to formal events. My first event out of uniform was a formal dinner, and like a good Marine, I did some research and made myself a checklist so I wouldn’t miss any of the bits and bobs that go into wearing a tux. That evening, as I put on my new white tuxedo shirt, I realized it was different from a regular white dress shirt in one significant way: It required cuff links. I scrambled around the bedroom, trying to find something to keep my cuffs shut. I settled on a pair of paper clips and hoped no one would notice.

This past year, one of my sons, age 17, had to wear a tuxedo for the first time. I sat him down, and we walked through the various pieces of his tux, so he could avoid an evening hiding his paper-clip cuff links. I told him everything I wish someone would have told me in order to dress for a special event with confidence.

As this year draws to a close, it’s tempting to catalog the best and the worst. The greatest movie? I didn’t see them all, but “One Battle After Another” has my vote. The most heinous song? Surely the awful one from Taylor Swift about her fiancé’s dick.

But there were simply too many albums, too many trends, too many TV shows, and too many celebrity faux pas to choose just one winner and loser. So instead, I’ve selected a few cultural shifts that sum up 2025.

The celebrity apology died this year. And the death was quick and seemingly painless, almost as if no one ever cared for the performative ass-covering in the first place?

In August, there was uproar after Sabrina Carpenter put out the art for her new album Man’s Best Friend. The cover photo showed the former Disney star on her hands and knees, in a skimpy dress, while an anonymous suited man roughly gripped a handful of her hair, holding it almost like a leash.

We all know that the news tends toward bleakness. Wars, terror attacks, violent crime—these are the kinds of stories that tend to make headlines.

Yet there are also those moments when the news is, from an objective standpoint, quite funny. The local curiosities, alcohol-fueled wildlife, and embarrassing relatives of prominent figures all lend a bit more color to our lives.

So with the end of the year approaching, and with Nellie Bowles’s beloved TGIF off until the New Year, we asked some of our journalists to highlight the humorous stories that have given us a little hope—or at least a laugh—in this otherwise grim year. Check them out below.

—The Editors

Suzy Weiss, Co-Founder and Reporter

When Lauren Sánchez and Jeff Bezos bought Venice for a weekend to get married; when the papal conclave elected an American pope; when Nicki Minaj took the stage alongside Erika Kirk at the annual Turning Point USA conference, saluting the audience as her song “Super Bass” blared: There was no dearth of stunning, is-this-for-real pop-culture moments this year. The rich got richer and flaunted it; our politics became even more bizarre—and indistinguishable with entertainment.

It’s Thursday, December 25. We at The Free Press wish you a very Merry Christmas. In today’s The Front Page, we’re bringing you a bumper package of festive content.

Shortly before his 50th birthday, Martin Shaw saw a star falling out of the sky.

If that sounds strange to you, rest assured: It was strange for him, as well.

Martin is a mythologist—the author of such books as Courting the Wild Twin—so he’d spent a lot of time thinking about ancient stories. But then, on a cold winter morning, he encountered one directly. As he wrote in our pages yesterday: “I had gone out into the bush for 101 days, peered into the mysteries as deeply as I possibly could, and found—what? The mossy face of Christ staring back at me?”

Raised in a Baptist church, Shaw drifted from religion as a teenager, until at middle age, he found himself unmoored: “After 25 years of touring, publishing books, and teaching at some of the great universities, I was bushed,” he writes. “I needed tangible contact with something that wasn’t a lecture hall or publishing deadline.”

So, he disappeared into an English forest for months to, in his words, “reconnect to my roots.” He prayed some, although he wasn’t quite sure what he was praying to. One night, he asked the Creator for guidance, and moments later had an experience so moving, it changed the entire trajectory of his life. Read Martin’s extraordinary account of the night that brought him back to God:

Next we have Matthew Walther, the editor of the literary Catholic magazine The Lamp, and his rummage through what he calls “the attic” of American religious history: the largely forgotten religious pioneers and eccentrics who helped pave the way for our modern pluralism. Among them: Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims, as well as proponents of more esoteric faiths like Swedenborgianism.

Part of our America at 250 series, it’s an enlightening, entertaining trip through history that helps explain how America’s “version of pluralism has somehow proven capacious enough to accommodate and even to nourish religious traditions that are themselves formally incompatible with pluralism, from pre-Vatican II Catholicism to Haredi Judaism to the Legacy Baptist Church in Coolidge, Arizona.” Read it—you’ll learn something.

Think your Christmas is challenging? To put in perspective those annoying relatives or dirty dishes staring at you from the sink, read the latest installment of our new newsletter on this week in American history, by Jonathan Horn. He takes us back to December 1775. Christmas was weeks away, and George Washington wasn’t in the festive mood: His troops were fewer than 10,000, his guns unreliable, and the cannons he ordered nowhere to be found. The service and sacrifice on display during that winter would help define the American cause—and set the standard for generations that followed. Read all about it here.

Next, we turn the clock back further—2,000 years to the birth of Christianity. On the latest episode of Honestly, Bari Weiss talks to Paula Fredriksen, one of the world’s leading scholars of the historical Jesus. How did a small group of Jews who thought of themselves as history’s last generation become the first Christians? And when did Christ’s followers begin to see themselves as distinct and separate from Judaism? These are just some of the questions answered in this Christmas special. To listen to Bari and Paula’s conversation, hit the play button below, or subscribe to Honestly wherever you get your podcasts.

Finally, between the rush of travel, hosting, and endless to-do lists, this time of year can easily become a frenzy. Which is a shame, because year’s end is the perfect time to slow down and rediscover meaning. And what better way than with a good book? We asked a trio of leaders from different religious traditions—Rabbi David Wolpe, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, and Eboo Patel—to recommend titles that nourish the spirit, and may bring us all a little closer to God. Here’s what they suggested:

Want more? Here are some of our favorite pieces from recent days and Christmases past.

From all of us at The Free Press, have a blessed Christmas.

—The Editors

Welcome back to our America at 250 series on faith, in which Free Press writers reflect on belief, history, and the freedoms that shape American life. You can catch up on what we’ve published so far, including Meir Soloveichik on why biblical faith lies at the origin of American equality, here.

Today, Matthew Walther, editor of Catholic literary journal “The Lamp,” explores what he calls the “attic” of American religious history: the Jews, Catholics, Buddhists, Muslims, and Swedenborgians who helped pave the way for our modern religious pluralism. That pluralism, Walther writes, is wild, weird, and inherently paradoxical—and it is the very lifeblood of this nation. —The Editors

In the land that the Native Americans called “the place of the bad smell,” a great city arose by the lake, and in this city was a golden hall, and in this hall, in the presence of the sage who had come from Serendip, the Island of Dharma, the merchant bowed and pledged himself to the Awakened One.

Welcome back to Tough Love with Abigail Shrier, the new advice column from The Free Press! Every Thursday, our contributing editor will address your conundrums, with no hesitation and no sugarcoating—just straight-up Tough Love. This week, Abigail answers a question from Julia (that’s not her real name), who’s considering severing ties with her brother because he won’t vaccinate his kids. To receive Tough Love directly in your inbox, every week, sign up here.

Dear Abigail,

I’m struggling with a painful family dilemma, and I don’t know what’s left to try. My brother and his wife refuse to vaccinate their children—unless they’re forced to, like when their kids were kicked out of school for being unvaccinated, specifically for not having the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) jab. We’ve tried to be nonjudgmental in our questions and suggested compromises on ways we can interact, but every conversation feels like we’re speaking different languages.

This is part of a broader pattern of unsafe choices that make it hard to spend time together. My brother and his wife have driven more than once on the highway without putting their infant in a car seat because “he cries too much.” They also brought their kids, who had fevers, to our 100-year-old grandfather’s birthday party. Moments like these leave me feeling anxious, angry, and unsure whether I can trust them around my own family. (I have three young children.)

I love my brother, and I’ve always believed family should matter. But the disconnect in our values and basic safety standards feels enormous, and I’m starting to wonder if the healthiest choice is to step back. We don’t have a cool uncle willing to intervene; otherwise, I would go that route. So what do I do? Do I sever ties? Should I keep trying to reconcile, or is it okay to accept that not all relationships can be fixed?

How do I navigate the guilt, the love, and the need to protect my own family?

Julia

Julia,

The first time I lost my little brother, he was 4. We were in our local Lord & Taylor, where he’d crept inside a fountain of racked clothing and ducked down so I wouldn’t see him. I tore through the racks, crying his name, until I found him smiling, thinking he had won this round of hide-and-seek.

Approaching 50 can do strange things to us.

We may erupt into an affair or splurge our life savings on a sports car. Me? I elected to stroll from my cottage into a nearby English forest at dusk for 101 days. My plan was to sit and listen, my back against a hazel tree.

I am a mythologist, a rather endangered species these days. I specialize in exploring the many layers of a myth or folktale, particularly those that are Irish and Arthurian. The tales of Beowulf, Baba Yaga, and Dionysus are rich with insight about the conditions of living and the kinds of monsters and blessings we may encounter along the way. But the problem with being an expert on anything is that you can become addicted to theory rather than direct encounter. It can get a little abstract in the lofty climbs of academia. After 25 years of touring, publishing books, and teaching at some of the great universities, I was bushed. I needed tangible contact with something that wasn’t a lecture hall or publishing deadline.

When we meet Ebenezer Scrooge in the opening pages of A Christmas Carol, he is “a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone . . . a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.” Muttering his catchphrase—“Bah! Humbug!”—he begrudges Londoners their annual Christmas cheer and generally exudes such nastiness that even seeing-eye dogs steer the blind away from him.

Long before that, though, Scrooge had been a child: a bookish boy, packed off to a decrepit rural boarding school by what author Charles Dickens hints is an abusive father, and abandoned there each year at Christmastime while other students visit home. When the reader learns this, the emotional trajectory of the story changes. The reader shifts from despising Scrooge to understanding him, or even rooting for him.

I return to A Christmas Carol every December—not in one of the countless film, television, radio, stage, or cartoon adaptations, but by rereading Dickens’s novella. This phantasmagorical tale of a mean old miser—confronted, on a seemingly endless Christmas Eve, by the consequences of his misspent life—never gets old.

Between the rush of travel, hosting, and endless to-do lists, the Christmas and New Year season can easily become a frenzy—leaving little space for what the holidays are truly about: rest, connection, and spiritual renewal.

But as the year winds down, there’s no better moment to pause, reflect, and rediscover meaning. Sometimes, that pause begins with something as simple, and as powerful, as a book.

To that end, we turned to three of our friends from different religious traditions and asked them to recommend titles that nourish the spirit, and may bring readers closer to God. Rabbi David Wolpe, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, and Eboo Patel, the Muslim founder of Interfaith America, made some wonderful—and surprising—selections. Together, they form a rich reading list for 2026. Enjoy! —The Editors

The Imitation of Christ (1441) by Thomas à Kempis

A devotional book like no other, Thomas à Kempis’s great work teaches how we can find God through simple devotion and turning away from material things. The passing of 600 years have done nothing to dim its power.

—Timothy Cardinal Dolan