Merry Christmas!
We’ve entered the most confusing week of the year—that week in between Christmas and New Years Day when time slows down, the days run together, and sustenance mostly looks like Christmas cookies, candy, and leftovers.
As we tie a bow on 2024 and prepare to look forward to 2025, I wanted to give out superlatives for a few of my favorite things from this past year. Read on for the official Warranted Best of 2024 Awards! 🏆
🏅 The series I haven’t stopped thinking about:
Of course this year’s reads get priority on the Best of 2024 list, but there’s one series in particular that deserves its own superlative: C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy.
Sometimes called the Ransom Trilogy, this story starts with a language professor in England in the late 1930s taking an unexpected journey to space and eventually blossoms into an all-out battle for control over the cosmos.
Out of the Silent Planet introduced the idea of space not as a vast, cold wasteland, but as a land of potential, filled with supernatural activity.
Perelandra included one of the scariest, most edge-of-your-seat storylines I’ve ever read.
That Hideous Strength infused commentaries on social pressures, the difficulty of belief, and gender into an exceptionally magical and enchanted world.
I could write an entire post on each of these stories alone. Go read them if you haven’t!
🏅 More of this year’s five-star reads:
Admittedly, I give lots of high ratings on Goodreads. (Sue me!) But it’s because I read lots of great books! Here are a few more of my favorites from this year, rapid-fire style:
Fiction
Hamlet by Shakespeare
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
Nonfiction
A Simple Guide to Experience Miracles by J.P. Moreland
The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels by Richard B. Hays
Miracles by C.S. Lewis
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl R. Trueman
If any of these titles pique your interest, I’ve written reviews for most of them on Goodreads.
🏅 An organization that has my entire heart:
In August of this year, I received an email from the Society for Women of Letters with a discount code to this year’s Women in Apologetics annual conference. I had never heard of WIA or their conference, so I clicked the link for more information, fully expecting the event to be somewhere across the country.
Imagine my excitement when I realized that this year’s event would be held right outside Nashville, Tennessee, less than two hours from my home!
I registered, and in September my mom and I attended the 2024 WIA Conference. The weekend was amazing; as I sat in the sanctuary the first evening, I really felt like I had found my people in the faith/apologetics world.
WIA is a nonprofit that relies on volunteers to produce most of their content, so when I returned home I updated my resume and submitted my volunteer application. I joined the WIA team as a Senior Writer in October, and it has been such a blessing to work for this ministry as they seek to equip, educate, and encourage women in the Christian faith.
Read more about WIA here, and follow them on social media—I’ll be sharing more here about my work with them in the coming year!
🏅 A new (to me) band that you need to check out:
I’m not sure if it was serendipity, divine intervention, or just the Spotify algorithm, but when songs by Gable Price and Friends showed up on both my and Carson’s feeds this fall, we were hooked. We listened to their most recent album on a road trip a couple months ago and basically took turns saying, “Oh, this song is really good” before every single track. Lyrically solid and sonically interesting—it checks all the boxes for me!
If you don’t want to listen to the entire album, start with the song “Think With Your Chest.”
🏅 Some of my favorite posts:
52 weeks in 2024 meant 52 posts. Sprinkle in a few podcasts and paid subscriber updates, and that’s a lot of activity on Warranted in the last year! Picking favorites is hard, but if I have to choose a few for this year in review:
🏅 Snoopy ambience:
Just trust me.
Thank you for all of your support! I cherish every read, share, comment, and like, and I look forward to sharing more in 2025!
Snoopy ambience 💯💯