A look at CommonWealth Beacon opinion pieces for 2025 means taking the pulse of the body politic and seeing the issues that drew attention and drove passions. They ranged from the most local debates over zoning or health care services in a particular community to the oxygen-sucking moves by a president whose first year back in office commanded nearly nonstop headlines as he broke with one norm after another.

Here are five topics that stood out.

A call for civil debate

Beyond showdowns on specific issues, what has loomed large in politics in recent years has been the way we debate contentious topics, or, more to the point, the way we don’t actually engage in meaningful debate. Disagreement over issues today often devolves into something more akin to grade-school name-calling. This degradation of discourse starts at the top. But Donald Trump’s unhesitating use of juvenile taunts and unchecked invective, not reasoned argument, is both a cause of the coarsening of public debate and a consequence of the turn away from more civil exchange of ideas that was already underway when he launched his first campaign.

Offering a desperately needed antidote to that, Jim Peyser, who served as education secretary under Charlie Baker, gave our readers a civics class in how to talk about thorny topics. Through a series of more than a dozen essays, Peyser set out to frame how to think about and weigh competing arguments on issues where, he says, things are often a lot more gray than black or white. “The goal is not to confuse or paralyze,” he wrote, “but to acknowledge and clarify the inescapable trade-offs in public policy (i.e., second-best and less-worse options) and to encourage humility, civility, and even empathy in our public discourse and decision-making.”

We took note of Peyser’s essays in our rundown of notable 2024 op-eds, but he continued his essay-writing with more pieces in 2025, and we thought his plea to steer away from the toxic vitriol that animates so many debates was something we can’t hear too often. His concluding essay in the series, published in October, includes links to all the essays. You can also hear Peyser talk about these issues on a recent episode of The Codcast.

We also heard calls for grace and civility in our public discourse in essays this year by communications professional Colette Phillips, who sits on CommonWealth Beacon’s advisory board. Meanwhile, Lane Glenn, the president of Northern Essex Community College and a MassINC board member, eloquently made the case for freewheeling debate and civil discourse in this September essay. “We are at a moment when extremists on both the left and the right use strategies ranging from public shaming and cancelling, to censoring and intimidating not just to disagree with the opposition, but to silence them — sometimes permanently,” he wrote following the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.