What I Learned from Writing About Faith in 2025
A New Year reflection on certainty, belonging, and why the questions wouldn’t leave me alone
Happy New Year
A look back at what writing about faith in 2025 taught me, about certainty, curiosity, community, and why paying attention matters more than having answers.
At the start of 2025, I thought I knew what I was writing about.
I assumed the year would be shaped by a familiar set of themes: biblical interpretation, doubt, the Church’s place in a changing culture, and the friction between faith and modern life. All of that did appear, of course. But when I look back through the 300-plus articles I wrote, something else stands out far more clearly.
Almost everything I wrote seemed to circle the same quieter question.
What happens to faith when we stop demanding certainty from it?
I didn’t plan that question. But clearly, it had been bubbling under the surface for some time.
Writing as an act of attention
One of the biggest surprises of the year was not simply what I wrote, but what writing itself became.
What began as an attempt to get my thoughts down and find a few like-minded people slowly turned into something deeper. Writing every day became a way of paying attention — to scripture, to experience, and to the quiet moments of faith that are easy to miss when life is loud.
Without really intending to, writing became a spiritual discipline.
Not because it was pious or productive, but because it demanded honesty, patience, and presence. It forced me to slow down. To sit with a text or a question longer than was sometimes comfortable. To resist the urge to rush to conclusions, and instead write as I was processing.
I didn’t expect any of that. But I am deeply grateful for it.
The themes that kept returning
Again and again, I found myself writing about faith not as a system of answers, but as a way of learning how to live with tension.
I wrote about:
Scripture as something to be read rather than defended
Certainty as something that often causes harm, not clarity
The damage done when religion becomes confident about who belongs and who does not
God encountered not in spectacle or certainty, but in silence, waiting, and unremarkable lives
Many of the articles began with familiar assumptions, the kind we absorb without noticing, and then gently pulled at them. Sentences began with:
It’s easy to assume…
We are tempted to read…
The problem isn’t the text…
Those phrases appeared so often because they reflected my own experience. I wasn’t standing above the material. I was inside it.
Finding unexpected companions
Another unexpected gift of the year was the people.
I have been genuinely amazed by how many readers were willing to entertain ideas that sit slightly outside conventional religious thinking — not defensively or suspiciously, but thoughtfully and generously.
Some agreed. Some didn’t. Many simply stayed with the question. I learned from everybody.
What I hadn’t anticipated was how much that openness would strengthen my own faith. Not by narrowing it or hardening it, but by stretching it. By reminding me that faith grows through conversation, not isolation.
Somewhere along the way, I realised something else too.
I finally felt at home.
Who gets pushed to the edges
One theme I didn’t expect to revisit so persistently was how religious confidence can quietly sideline those who hold different views or live different realities.
Women.
Disabled bodies.
Those living with illness.
People whose lives don’t fit tidy theological categories.
I kept returning to the same discomfort: how easily faith can turn difference into a problem to be managed, rather than a reality to be honoured.
What struck me most was how often Jesus seems to move in the opposite direction — away from certainty and control, towards those the system finds inconvenient.
That tension shaped far more of my writing than I realised at the time.
The pieces that lasted
Something else became clear as the year went on.
Articles tied closely to seasons, controversies, or church calendars often faded quickly. But the pieces that continue to resurface, sometimes months later, share a different quality.
They ask timeless questions.
They avoid culture-war language.
They focus less on what to believe and more on how we read, listen, and respond.
Those pieces don’t offer conclusions.
They offer space.
What changed in my writing — and in me
Looking back, I can see a shift over the year.
Early on, my writing was sharper. More defensive. More eager to land the point.
By the end of 2025, something had softened. Paragraphs grew longer. Single-sentence lines appeared less often. I became more willing to let an article end without tying it up neatly.
That wasn’t a loss of conviction. It was a gain in trust. Trust in the reader, and a growing confidence that faith does not need to be propped up by certainty to survive.
If anything, my faith is stronger now than it was at the start of the year. Not louder. Not more certain. But more resilient, and more spacious.
Carrying one thing into the new year
If 2025 taught me anything, it’s this:
Faith doesn’t collapse when answers fail; it collapses when curiosity dies.
So as a new year begins, I’m less interested in being certain and more interested in staying attentive.
To the text.
To lived experience.
To the people willing to think out loud together.
That feels like a good place to begin again.
I don’t know exactly where my writing will go in 2026. If this year taught me anything, it’s that the most important questions rarely announce themselves in advance.
But I’m excited to keep paying attention — to scripture, to experience, and to the conversations that grow when people are willing to think honestly together.
Wherever that leads, I’m grateful to be sharing the journey with you, and to see this small community continue to grow.
Thank you for being part of this space.
Sacred & Secular will continue posting daily throughout 2026, offering reflections at the intersection of faith, culture, and lived experience.
I’m grateful to be sharing the journey with you.