The Archive

Every essay.

Jake MeadorEconomicsBook ReviewsJulius NyererePan-Africanism

Reading the Pan-Africanists: Julius Nyerere (II) - Commonplaces

Continuing: The production of wealth, whether by primitive or modern methods, requires three things. First, land. God has given us the land, and it is from the land that we get the raw materials which we reshape to meet our […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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. […]