Highlighting the Top 10 stories you told us you enjoyed—and shared with friends—in 2024
‘You’ve got to read this!’
When readers share our stories—we know we’re touching lives far and wide.
AS WE DO IN THE LAST WEEK OF EACH YEAR, we look back across our previous 51 issues. In this case, we highlight 10 stories that inspired our readers to share good news in 2024! Please, remember to keep passing along these inspiring and thought-provoking stories to friends as we move into the New Year 2025. When we share links to these stories, we increase the hope, wisdom and good news that flows across social media and circles our globe.
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Jeffrey Munroe on the power of ‘Telling Stories in the Dark’
‘When we tell our stories, others find their own healing and hope’
THIS COVER STORY by DAVID CRUMM OPENED: Healing. Hope. Don’t those two words sound wondrously powerful? And—don’t those two words seem desperately needed by all of us in our troubled world, today? That’s why I responded so enthusiastically on behalf of our publishing house the moment journalist, author and pastor Jeffrey Munroe proposed his new book to me.
As it turned out, readers nationwide responded to Jeff’s new book with equal enthusiasm throughout 2024. By June, 2024, we published a follow-up story in our Front Edge Publishing website about that positive public response, headlined, Jeffrey Munroe on the road: ‘an opportunity for readers to tell their own stories’.
Millions are religiously ‘Unaffiliated,’ but please don’t call them ‘Nones’
MSU’s Bias Busters explain one of America’s largest ‘religious’ groups
The writers who contribute to our online magazine have been reporting on this dramatic shift in American religious life for more than a decade. Eventually, the Michigan State University School of Journalism Bias Busters produced an entire book-length guide to the fastest growing “religious” group in America. In fact, these folks—who decline to give pollsters a traditional religious label as a way to identify them—are quite spiritually diverse.
OUR STORY EXPLAINED: One major milestone in American life that is easy to miss in many of the press reports about the unaffiliated is this: Rather than a shrinking of America’s religious diversity, this huge group of people who reject our most common religious labels seems to represent an expansion of America’s spiritual diversity.
The new MSU Bias Busters book was so timely, in fact, that just a month later—in March 2024—we published an update about how pollsters and journalists still were struggling to describe this trend.
Readers are telling Rusty about their challenges—and the value of her ‘Two Envelopes’
For example, have you discussed with your family what you will wear when you die?
Like Jeffrey Munroe, author Rusty Rosman took off like an astronaut in 2024—zooming around the country (in person and via Zoom) to talk with groups about an issue that most people rarely discuss: What do we want our family and friends to know when we die? As somber as that may sound, Rusty has proven, over and over again, that people are eager to speak out about what they hope will happen when they pass. Throughout 2024, Rusty would address audiences about these challenges—then, when she was done with her presentation, she would find men and women approaching her to purchase multiple copies of her book, Two Envelopes, to give to their own friends and loved ones.
News stories about Rusty’s popularity—and the obvious need for the kind of family discussions she is sparking—kept popping up in newspapers and magazines nationwide. An example of this ongoing “national conversation” about Rusty’s work as an author was a March 4 column written by Barbara Braver about her own mother’s death—and an elegant silk blouse.
Timely help: Mindy Corporon and Howard Brown talk about resilience in the wake of tragedy
In March, two of our experts on resilience converged.
Howard Brown—the author of Shining Brightly and the producer of a podcast about finding spiritual resilience—hosted Mindy Corporon, a nationally known expert on coping with grief after trauma. This particular conversation was broadcast across the Internet just a couple of weeks after the horrific shootings at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade.
This podcast had a strong impact on listeners because these two people—Mindy and Howard—have big hearts, lots of hard-earned wisdom and have made it their mission in life to help others face similar challenges.
This podcast that remains one of the most powerful of the 100-plus broadcasts that Howard has produced—along with a special December 2024 podcast Howard produced with is daughter Emily, a TV newscaster from Montana. In that bittersweet broadcast, father and daughter talk about how they are coping with the fact that Howard is ending 2024 in a life-and-death struggle with advanced leukemia.
Return to that little island where mysteries keep washing up
Readers fell in love with Laura Elizabeth’s cozy mystery series
As a publishing house, we knew that cozy mystery novelist Laura Elizabeth had built a loyal audience when, in early spring 2024, we published her story about transforming her first novel into an immersive dinner theater.
Then, like many cozy authors, Laura decided to release her second annual volume in the series—once again set on that small, historic island off the Atlantic Coast. That allowed her to begin planning for a second dinner theater experience in the spring of 2025 (which was the subject of the Front Edge Publishing story linked in the main headline, above).
If you love cozy mysteries—or have a cozy fan on your shopping list this year—please give the gift of these wonderfully engaging novels featuring characters you’ll enjoy and vivid descriptions of a real-life slice of Atlantic coastal history.
Making more money isn’t the only value driving us to invest
Core Values Continue to unite Americans
Since our founding in 2007, we have published books and online columns about the core values—spiritual, cultural and moral—that unite us. And, that continues to be true even in a turbulent election year in which Americans seem to be deeply divided.
In early 2025, we are once again addressing those core American values “head on” in a new book by Jonathan Grimm called, The Future Poor: How Families and Communities Can Join Together to Survive the Looming Retirement Crisis.
The article linked from the headline above is half of a two-part Cover Story we published in April. It’s Jonathan Grimm’s overview of a new book by colleague Andrea Longton. The other half of that week’s Cover Story was a Q-and-A with Andrea, interviewed by David Crumm. Together, these articles represent the kind of “national conversation” we encourage our authors to foster.
Jonathan is an expert at encouraging such outreach—including a free series of short, newsy columns he launched in 2024 to share the latest financial news explained for ordinary readers. That free, email-based service is called simply The Grimm News.
Neighbors finding ‘common ground’ in discussing the Bible
Truly “good news” worth sharing!
A great example of the grassroots conversations we hope to foster as a publishing house—through the books and columns we publish—took place in a Texas congregation, coordinated by our colleague Ann Worley, who has worked with us as an editor, a project manager and a writer.
People who read this column by Ann in October told us that it was “breath of fresh air” and a “dose of encouragement” in a year in which outspoken forces seemed to be tearing our nation apart. Despite the dire news, the truth is that many men and women in communities nationwide still welcome opportunities to talk to each other. In this column, Ann herself describes her experiences with fellow church members as a series of “welcome surprises.”
National Catholic Reporter’s new ‘Beacon of Justice, Community and Hope’
Capturing the vital history of NCR in 4 videos
Perhaps the most ambitious book we published in 2024—certainly the most in-depth book this year—was a history of the impact of the National Catholic Reporter on the life of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
In this memorable ReadTheSpirit Cover Story, we asked the book’s main contributors to appear in short videos, explaining the importance of this milestone.
Our 9th ‘Best Story’ is Stephanie Fenton’s InterfaithHolidays.com
Readers far and wide rely on this expert’s reporting
For many years, our publishing house team has been honored to serve as the online home for Stephanie Fenton’s reporting on holidays, festivals, anniversaries and other milestones. We’ve heard from community leaders far and wide who rely on her annual 12-month calendars—as well as her reporting each week in the pages of ReadTheSpirit. Over more than a decade, Stephanie’s stories have become core pillars for our online community of readers.
Stephanie is closing out 2024 with one last column, headlined: New Year’s Eve, Watch Night: Welcome, 2025!
Stay tuned to www.ReadTheSpirit.com each week, because—very soon—we will be publishing Stephanie’s complete 2025 interfaith calendar. We know from readers’ notes over the years that a good number of you will want to share that news with your own organizations and networks—which is something we welcome by publishing all of this material under Creative Commons.
Our 10th ‘story’ is ‘In Memoriam’
Two of our beloved authors died in 2024—and we all miss their encouraging, compassionate voices. So, finally, filling out the 10th slot in our list of the year’s most important stories are these two headlines we were sad to share with readers:
Farewell to our Friend, Faith & Film Critic Edward McNulty (1936-2024), an Obituary and Remembrance
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