All posts by Jake Meador

Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. He is a 2010 graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he studied English and History. He lives in Lincoln, NE with his wife Joie, their daughter Davy Joy, and sons Wendell, Austin, and Ambrose. Jake's writing has appeared in Commonweal, Christianity Today, Fare Forward, the University Bookman, Books & Culture, First Things, National Review, Front Porch Republic, and The Run of Play and he has written or contributed to several books, including "In Search of the Common Good," "What Are Christians For?" (both with InterVarsity Press), "A Protestant Christendom?" (with Davenant Press), and "Telling the Stories Right" (with the Front Porch Republic Press).

Orbanism and the Revolution

One of the chief difficulties about the conversation between the Augustinian Liberal Christian Right and the Reactionary Christian Right to this point has been a lack of clarity about the actual political principles and norms that reactionary conservative evangelicals affirm.

/ July 5, 2022

The Violence We Can’t Live Without

It is easier to be violent than it is to care. That is the problem near the heart of so many of the maladies afflicting our nation today. Care costs us something. It demands something from us. If you choose...

/ June 28, 2022
supreme-court

The Land is Bright

And not through eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light; In front the sun climbs slow, — how slowly! But westward — look! the land is bright. ~ A. H. Clough And so Roe is overthrown. Some...

/ June 24, 2022

Evangelization After the Secular Sabbath

For Christians of a certain age, I expect a certain kind of Christian testimony will sound familiar: You grow up in a home with both of your biological parents (who are married), you grow up in and around the church,...

/ June 14, 2022

Growing the Merry Band

A short update on where things stand at Mere O HQ (AKA my home study): I’ve been doing Mere Orthodoxy full-time since January. God willing and if the magazine’s finances allow it, this is what I will be doing FT for the...

/ June 6, 2022
francis-schaeffer

Winsomeness, Evangelism, and Pastoral Theology

It is an odd thing to see a pastor from New York City presented as the spokesman for a movement supposedly defined by its concern with “winsomeness.” Though I do not know the city that well, my few trips to it have...

/ June 3, 2022

The Self is a Problem

There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality,...

/ June 1, 2022

The Three Ages of Christian American Exceptionalism

In 1789, Otobo Cugoano, a freed slave and a Christian, wrote in his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery against those who claimed that the manstealing and enslavement of Africans was justified by the fact that some of...

/ May 31, 2022

In Memoriam: Michael Baker: Teacher of Persons

I suspect that my old high school teacher Michael Baker would have rather mixed feelings about having an obituary published in a magazine called Mere Orthodoxy. Certainly, he was the kind of teacher that would have scared many white evangelical parents,...

/ May 30, 2022

On Loving Newcastle

Michael Chaplin. Newcastle United Stole My Heart: Sixty Years in Black and White. London: Hurst and Co, 2021. 280pp, $25.00. The first thing to say is that Michael Chaplin’s Newcastle United Stole My Heart is one of the most delightfully...

/ May 18, 2022