Have you been waiting for me to list the top 10 ReligionProf posts of 2024? Your wait is over. As has been typical in past years, I will focus on which posts were the most read this year, including posts written earlier, while also giving an indication of what else would make the list if it were limited to posts written this year. Can you guess which posts were the most popular before reading further?
The #10 most popular post on this blog this year was me sharing a social media conversation with someone who is an outspoken critic of the Church of England for moves in the direction of full inclusion and equality of gays and lesbians.
Post #9 is about what the Book of Revelation has to say about whether all dogs go to heaven, or indeed any.
#8 is a post about a topic that led a popular online social media presence to cancel an interview with me about my recent books. He interviewed the person who created the thing that is absolutely not in any sense the “original Aramaic Lord’s prayer” and I had the audacity to point out that the individual’s creation is nothing of the sort.
The post ranked #7 most popular this year addressed the claim that “life begins at conception” and why it is misleading. On the one hand, if you really mean life, then it is present before conception. If you mean human personhood, then it is not yet present at conception by any standard otherwise used to determine that.
At #6 is my post about Jesus according to AI, or at least, according to one artist using AI tools to develop a composite of the various images of Jesus, including some of the most ancient depictions of him in icons.
The #5 most popular post is one that really is a tangent from this blog’s usual focus, and yet it ranks highly year after year, and so there are clearly things besides religion, science fiction, music, and politics that people care deeply about. And to be honest, it was a very clever idea for how to make a squirrel baffle.
Post ranking #4 was written this year and yet seems like it is from so long ago. Was the movie Testament: The Story of Moses really released in March of this year?
The #3 post may have been helped by the fact that I made a meme with the quote from Everything Everywhere All At Once that inspired the post. I still seek to live by it, and still keep returning to it for inspiration
The #2 post this year was the one about biblical allusions in “We Are The World.” I continue to mention it in my class on the Bible and music and worked it into my textbook on that subject as well.
My #1 post of the year received a whopping 47,314 views. I was glad to be able to have an influence for good in the midst of serious online bullying and misinformation. To be sure, when I asked the question in the title of the post, “What if Imane Khelif was your daughter?” I was appealing to empathy in a way that shouldn’t be necessary. It should be enough that she is a fellow human being. But a lot of people simply took for granted the lies that were shared online that she was intersex or something else, none of which had any basis in any evidence.
If we focused only on posts written this year, then we would need to add to the list my posts about political false prophets, a sin unlike any other (on same-sex relationships), making sense of the re-election of Donald Trump, information bubbles, Kamala Harris’ “wrong rally” quip, and a couple of Doctor Who episodes. Can you guess which? “Space Babies” and “Boom“!
Which were your personal favorites? Comments from individual readers mean more to me than generic statistics. Let me know, so that I make sure I continue to offer posts focusing on the things faithful readers are interested in next year.
In keeping with custom, let me also re-share a post from more than a decade ago about the “War on New Year’s Day.” Hope it brings you a smile.
Thank you for reading. I wish you a happy and healthy 2025!
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