Book Review: Reclaiming Hope by Michael Wear
In Reclaiming Hope Michael Wear has written an engaging, clarifying work that nevertheless fails because it does not properly distinguish between a person’s testimony and their political theology. As such, the book often begins well before veering off into needless ambiguity...
Ben Sasse, James K. A. Smith, and Smuggling in Virtue
This guest review is written by Ben Whisenant. Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse has written a book about raising children to be adults, and strangely for a book written by a sitting politician, it contains no concrete policy proposals. It’s a truism,...
On Father’s Day, Living in Losses, and Home
There’s nothing that can prepare you to touch your father’s arm and find that it’s frozen. I should have known, of course. Doctors had told us what they were doing and said he’d be cold. But it’s one thing to know...
Lessons from the UK for American Evangelicals
You’ll have to forgive my sounding like something of a broken record by this point, but I couldn’t let this news pass without flagging it for Mere O readers:
On Ben Sasse, Civil Society, and Voting Records
Last week Matthew Walther went hard after one of my Senators, Ben Sasse, in a piece for The Week. The piece wandered a bit, but I basically agreed with it: It’s hard to make sense of Sasse as a politician because...
A Brief Commendation: The Addicts Next Door
I cannot remember reading an essay that has moved me as much as Margaret Talbot’s devastating New Yorker piece on our opioid crisis. The prose is mostly unadorned, because it can be. Many of the stories Talbot recounts are so...
W. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk–Chapter 4
In chapter four Du Bois reflects on his time teaching at a black one-room schoolhouse in rural Tennessee. As such, most of the chapter is simply taken up with recounting what life looked like for an itinerant black school teacher...
Book Review: Keeping Place by Jen Pollock Michel
When Francis and Edith Schaeffer were writing about issues like ecology, home, and place in the late 1960s and early 70s, they were to the best of my knowledge the only evangelicals doing so. While they laid great foundations with Pollution...
How Marketing Jargon Poisons Christian Community
We’ll be back to normal posting next week (I’ve been traveling for the past week which has made writing and editing difficult), but for the moment I wanted to flag a short review from the latest issue of Christianity Today and make...
Martin Bucer’s Strenuous Life
Reading Sen. Ben Sasse’s recent book The Vanishing American Adult reminded me of a chapter I read about the home life of Martin Bucer, a 16th century pastor and leader in the Protestant Reformation. Though his lifestyle was not that aberrant amongst the...