The Archive

Every essay.

Jake MeadorHistoryEconomicsBook Reviews

Positivism and Universal Free Markets - Commonplaces

Gray: The core of Logical Positivism was the development of a scientific worldview. Going further than Saint-Simon and Comte, the Logical Positivists declared that only the verifiable propositions of science have meaning: strictly speaking, religion, metaphysics and morality are nonsense. […]

Jake MeadorHistoryBook Reviews

Gray and the Deeply Modern Bolsheviks - Commonplaces

John Gray: The roots of the Soviet system were in the Enlightenment’s most utopian dreams. Lenin never gave up the belief that, after a period of revolutionary terror, the state would be abolished. Trotsky defended the taking and killing of […]

Casey ShuttFeaturedCultureChurch

Distrust's Thicket and the Life of the PCA - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

In the fall of 1998, I added what was at the time a pertinent, hot off the press book to my college dorm bookshelf alongside classics like Lewis’s Mere Christianity and Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. The book, Francis Beckwith and […]

Jake MeadorHistoryCommunities

In Memoriam: Queen Elizabeth II - Commonplaces

In the climactic scene of the 1998 movie The Truman Show, the protagonist, a man named Truman and played by Jim Carrey, has recently discovered that this entire life has been a TV show lived out inside a gigantic dome […]

Randall FowlerFeaturedEvangelicalismCulture WarCurrent Politics

Rules for Winsomeness - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

At root, the kerfuffle sparked by James Wood’s summer essay(s) on winsomeness revolves around the question of what makes for an effective Christian witness in America’s current sociocultural moment. For many, this question raises additional issues for how Christians should […]

Amy FischerFeaturedEducation

Persons Not Products - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

Charlotte Mason helped me make sense of my education. I had caring and competent teachers in high school, but they could not compensate for the educational system we operated in. You may find that system familiar. It breaks education down […]

Cole HartinFeatured

Memento Mori: Death in the West Through the Ages - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2, KJV) … Late in the fall I stood at the graveside, the cutting […]

Kevin BrownFeatured

The Something More of Sex - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

In a strikingly vulnerable 2018 New York Times article, author Courtney Sender casts a light on today’s impoverished sexual norms by describing her own disappointing experience. Her date, a connection through Tinder, requested Sender’s consent for nearly everything. Kissing. Undressing. […]

Matthew LaPineFeaturedChurch

Preventing Destructive Leadership: Some Reflections for Elders - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

We ought to be aware by now of the danger of destructive leaders. 2020 brought two important books addressing the issue, Chuck DeGroat’s When Narcissism Comes to the Church and Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer’s A Church Called Tov. Russell […]

Jake MeadorChurch

Christendom in Winter - Commonplaces

There’s a certain sort of mainline Protestant, blessedly rare these days so far as I can tell, who has at times argued that while Scripture might teach that such and such is the Christian teaching on sexuality, we must adapt […]

Simon StokesFeaturedChurchEvangelicalism

A Ride Worth Leaving: Escaping the Anxiety of the Modern Church - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. —Ecclesiastes 1:9 Imagine a windmill with its blade turning in the breeze. The blade of […]

Miles SmithFeaturedHistoryCurrent Politics

A Puritan Founding? - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

Earlier this year Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry published The Flag + the Cross, a sociological expose on what they identified as the threat to American democracy from what they called white Christian nationalism. It’s a work of sociology more […]