Best of 2025—and What We’re Looking Forward to in 2026
As we prepare to begin publishing new work later this month, we wanted to take a moment to look back at our top performing pieces of 2025. We’re grateful for the extraordinary conversations our writers and readers have made possible, and we’re excited to keep building on that momentum in the year ahead.
Here are our top five most read works, in the order of total views:
“Eating Elizabethan” by Krystal Marsh
“What Foucault Meant When He Said ‘Genealogy’” by Ryan McDermott
“Ibsen’s A Doll’s House: A Forgotten Christmas Classic” by Jacob Martin
“The Gilded Age” by Jacob Martin
“The Problem of the Spiritual in Contemporary Art” by Arthur Aghajanian and Taylor Worley
Alongside these reader favorites, we’re making some “Editor’s picks” to spotlight specific works for their depth and originality.
Among them is Anthony Bartlett’s bracing two-part essay, “On Not Counting on the Katechon” (part i and part ii). Bartlett offers a genealogy of the katechon— a mysterious figure from Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians—while responding to its recent uptake in the writings of Peter Thiel.
Elizabeth Stice has published some great work with us last year, like this especially strong essay that traces a genealogical link between Flaubert’s Emma Bovary and today’s social-media economy: “Madame Bovary and the Perils of Media Consumption.” (You can find more of her work here.)
And last, Brian M. Ross explores the possibility of a post- post-modernity that emphasizes connections between religion and science—what he calls “transmodernity”—in “The Return of Enchantment: Relational Reality at the Edge of Modernity.” This last one has drawn quite a bit of interest on our Substack, which is the easiest way to get new work from GenMod directly in your email inbox (you can sign up for the newsletter by clicking on this link)!
Looking ahead to 2026, we have an exciting slate of work on the way: interviews with leading thinkers on questions like whether or not to have children; forums on the legacy of Catholic social thinker Peter Maurin; and much more that we can’t wait to share. Stay tuned!
