The Best Ever from Ekstasis

As we evolve

Jan 08, 2025

It’s been a journey! What started in an amorphous state at the end of 2016 gained a more stable form through trial, lots of error, and glimmers of success by 2020. When Christianity Today approached us to acquire Ekstasis in 2021, we had a good foundation to build something meaningful for the long haul. And that’s where we are now as we cross the threshold of 2025: a new and exhilarating beginning. But before we expand on what the future of Ekstasis will look like, it only makes sense to celebrate what has made us, us.

These choices were sorted by the overall number of reads via website & newsletter, the discussion they generated, the amount of social media engagement & a small dash of editorial favoritism.

Our Top 10 Essays

1. How I Quit Consumerism & Rediscovered God 💸
By

Commoners Communion

In a consumer world, our relationship with God lives under threat of two false ideas: firstly, that God is there to give us good things (however we might like to dress it up in spiritual language) and secondly, that God is most interested in what we can give to him. Both are production-based paradigms. Both are undignifying to our personhood. Most importantly, neither are true.

2. A Call for Weird Christian Art ☄️
By Josh Tiessen

While my proposal of “holy weirdness” may be risky, we are called to engage our generation in their native tongue of doubt and dialogue—prioritizing the dialectic over the dogmatic. The days of “easy Christianity” that blends into the culture are quickly passing by.

3. Like & Subscribe for a Chance at Eternal Life 🖲️
By

Yi Ning Chiu

Self-mythologizing was hard and uncertain work. In addition to being exhausted by the sheer difficulty of the task, I was troubled by the spiritual incoherence of what I was doing. Why was I working so hard to impress people? Why did I even want the things I wanted? Was any of this okay? All these questions were about to be answered by the burgeoning social internet.

4. Writing as Pure Play 🌀
By Raed Gilliam

It starts as pure joy. It starts with toy castles and soldiers taking shape from the blunt end of a crayon. It grows into hours spent after school writing out the scenes that formed while daydreaming in class. The words flow with a youthful inventiveness. It’s an Edenic scene. You are innocent, unashamed…Then comes the luring hiss of a greatness that could be yours.

5. The Consequences of Mysticism 🩸
By

Carolyn Etzel Branch

Mysticism is a siren’s call to the modern Christian contemplative and I am not immune to its allure. It’s fashionably, tastefully eerie. In a world allergic to uncertainty, mysticism extends an invitation to come and sit awhile with what we do not understand, to peer into luminous darkness and encounter a God who is bigger than not only our answers, but our very questions.

6. Treasures of Darkness 🍂
By

Paul J. Pastor

My sincere hope and my creative vision is that the rich thinking and deep emotion that characterize the best writing today—including the best writing by Christians—may be balanced by a rediscovery of the dream-thing, the image-thing in us.

7. Don’t Do Your Best 🛠️
By

Karen Stiller

At the heart of our best work is not doing our best at all. It is showing up and working the process like my dog with his bone in our tiny backyard. At the end of our wild and creative lives when we hug our people goodbye and we have set down our paint and our pens for this time and place, maybe then there will be something beautiful we hold in our hands and say, “This is the best I did.”

8. Memoir of an Unremarkable Life 📚
By

Elizabeth Oldfield

I would still struggle to describe myself as an artist or a poet… but I longed for the moment when my work made another person feel the sweet relief of recognition. To provoke a response like “I thought I was the only one who felt that” is profoundly humanizing. I have experienced it, in novels as well as memoirs—that single electric sentence that pulls taut the thread of our shared humanity with a twang.

9. Theology in the Grit ⏳
By

Josh Nadeau

We understand by contrast, and if we live as though suffering is non-existent or just a temporary bump in the road, one easily ignored, we forfeit our understanding and enjoyment of true pleasure. When we kill what is real and genuine within us—neutering it into safe and explainable platitudes—we lose more than simply what we fear.

10. Necessary Secrecy 🌿
By Sara Kyoungah White

Each memory is a refugia, protected by our necessary secrecies. It is where our lives endure. And to whisper them aloud is to expand, one refugia brushing against another, until in our telling and our living we find the charred landscape has begun to bloom.

Our Top 10 Poems