Visions of Exile: Christian Communitarianism, Christian Secularism, and Faithful Presence
How can Christians live faithfully in an ever-changing and increasingly pluralistic world? How can we maintain that faithfulness, both over the course of our own lives and from generation to generation? What sort of formation do we and our children...
The People Who Divide Us: Reviewing Owen Strachan’s “Christianity and Wokeness”
Owen Strachan. Christianity and Wokeness. Washington: Salem Books, 2021. 224 pp, $19.99. The church was meant to be the hope of the world and a reflection of a diverse community reflecting the harmony of the Triune God Himself. Unfortunately, the...
A Univers(ity) Without a Story
Blessed are those who dwell in your house, ever singing your praise! Selah -Psalm 84:4 Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is a novel open to myriad interpretations. One reading of the story is as a parable helping us rediscover the integrative power of the...
The Virtues We Need to Repair Trust
As residents of Washington, D.C., we had a front row seat to the events of January 6, 2021 as they unfolded in our neighborhood streets. Glued to our couches and phone screens, we heard the sirens blare down streets to...
Our Year in Reading (2021)
Here’s a short summary of the books that several of us amongst the regular Mere O editors and contributors enjoyed this year: Jake Meador One of my most enjoyable reads this year was Michael Chaplin’s Newcastle United Stole My Heart. It’s a...
The World Becomes Light Again
I have long had an obsession with books. Since middle school, at least, I have loved to sit by a shelf and examine the titles, to arrange them, to examine their cover art, to read the summaries and flip through...
The 2021 Eliot Awards
Since 2017, I’ve made a habit of going back at the end of the year to review and recognize some of my favorite pieces in magazine and web writing from the past 12 months. Inspired by David Brooks’s old Sydney...
In Defense of Dante
I read Dante for the first time in my ninth grade English class at McNeil High School. I have hazy memories of my teacher lecturing about the first few circles of Dante’s inferno, but the mental image of the ninth...
Advent and the Near Irrelevance of Political Power
The Advent story, as commonly conceived, tells of the remarkable events that lead up to the birth of Jesus, as found in the opening chapters of Luke’s Gospel. It also introduces the reader to some of the most powerful political...
Why We All Need Baptists to be Baptist
The liturgy started sleepily this fourth Sunday in Advent, people trickling in later than usual. A traffic jam made traveling downtown to our Anglican parish especially difficult. It turned out the standstill was caused by the Secret Service. As we,...