Month: November 2021
Where We’ve Been; Where We’re Going
Mere Orthodoxy was founded in 2005 as a blog run by several recent graduates from the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University in Los Angeles. It was a space where these friends, which included our founding editor Matthew Lee Anderson,...
The Cost of Nurture
Christians and even some non-Christian philosophers regularly strive to ‘remember death,’ but few of us seem willing to remember our birth. Only a few paragraphs into Augustine’s Confessions, he recalls the grace of God given to him by his own...
Finitude for the Faithful
Oliver Burkeman. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. 288 pp, $27.00. St. Augustine taught that the fundamental condition of human beings is ignorance and difficulty. This truth can seem outdated in the...
The End of the Liberalism Debate
We now seem to be at the end of a debate that has roiled the American Right for the past several years, or so says Sohrab Ahmari, one of the chief figures in that debate. But before we get to...
Journey Into Understanding: Adapting George MacDonald’s Phantastes
Cave Pictures Publishing is creating a graphic novel adaptation of George MacDonald’s classic fairy tale allegory Phantastes, a work that famously was a major influence on a young C.S. Lewis. I got to discuss the project (currently on Kickstarter) with...
Ecclesial Realignment After the Culture Wars
Last summer, the recently retired minister Ray Ortlund announced that he had been appointed a canon theologian, a teaching office in the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA). That a recently retired minister who held a PhD and had taught...
That Word Does Not Mean What You Think it Means: Freedom, the Aridity of Grace, and a More Spacious Life
I was overwhelmed with the limits on my time and body: with four small children aged 6 and under, and as the primary caregiver, I was the sun around which they orbited. My limbs and body were the rays that...
Trauma, Attachment, and Self-Care: What Everyone Should Know
Trauma. Once a word that solely referred to a physical wound, it is now far more popularly discussed with regards to psychological wounds. One can read dozens of books about trauma and find countless memes floating around discussing it, but...
Ten Theses on Homosexuality and the Church
I wrote the following to clarify my own thoughts and also to (indirectly) respond to some recent discussions and developments within my own denomination (the PCA). But at present here are my own reflections on homosexuality today as a pastor...
Public Health After Christendom
How are we to consider public health when the health of the public officials themselves would not be recognizable to prior generations? Are we to simply stick our heads in the sand pretending that everything is normal? The CDC has...