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Here are Steve Thorngate's most-read posts of the year.

"With the First Amendment, you’re never protecting Jefferson; it’s usually protecting some guy who’s burning a flag."

"The Catholic church has deep roots in majority-Catholic Cuba, even after Fidel Castro's experiment with Communist-style state atheism, and still plays a real role in politics there."

Some people see violence as an absolute wrong. Others see it as a sometimes necessary evil, with considerable variation as to just how often these times come up. I’m at the dovish end of the latter group: I believe that there are times—not many, not remotely as many as American foreign policy consensus or law enforcement norms would have it, but some times—when a violent action might be the least-bad available option.

But a necessary evil isn’t a virtue; “least bad” doesn’t mean “good.”

"I do question whether belief is a productive framework for this story, because it suggests faith in something that lies outside the bounds of human knowledge. To put claims of rape in this category is to buy the idea that rape reports are by nature ambiguous, and that feelings override facts."

I was baptized in a swimming pool in my childhood pastor’s backyard. I was seven. Asked to make a confession of faith, I mumbled something incoherent through chattering teeth. I was focused on the embarrassing fact that my feet did not reach the bottom; my pastor and my dad had to hold me up.

The congregation was young then and worshiped in a font-less gymnasium. These days it does baptisms either in its baptistry or in a lake across town. The pastor who baptized me is long gone. So is his backyard pool—I checked.

ProPublica has been doing a series of reports about the Red Cross’s misleading rhetoric about how it uses donations:

The American Red Cross regularly touts how responsible it is with donors' money. "We're very proud of the fact that 91 cents of every dollar that's donated goes to our services," Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern said in a speech in Baltimore last year. "That's world class, obviously."

These are wise words from Chris Rock, words that bring to mind the point often made by Ta-Nehisi Coates, among others: that while race may be a construct, this doesn’t change the all-too-clear reality of racism. 

This year, instead of soliciting writers to do end-of-year lists of books, music, and TV/film in specific areas, the Century asked its editors, columnists, and hosted bloggers to each select three items we'd like to give to others and three items we hope to receive, in whatever area.