Christians in the Gray Zone: The Strong Gods are Back
In his 1978 commencement address at Harvard University, the great Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn argued that what united the capitalist west and communist east mattered more than what divided them. Both, he said, had lost any feel for the transcendent,...
Black Patriotism and National Conservatism
I watched Glenn Loury’s address at the second National Conservatism conference around the time of the event with great interest. Since then, I’ve also seen the print version of it in First Things. You can view the video of the...
The Culture War Comes Home
The culture war arrived in my hometown a few weeks ago with the approval of a new fairness ordinance by the Lincoln City Council. The ordinance is designed to provide protections against harassment and discrimination for LGBT+ people in Lincoln....
Our Year in Reading (2021)
Here’s a short summary of the books that several of us amongst the regular Mere O editors and contributors enjoyed this year: Jake Meador One of my most enjoyable reads this year was Michael Chaplin’s Newcastle United Stole My Heart. It’s a...
The 2021 Eliot Awards
Since 2017, I’ve made a habit of going back at the end of the year to review and recognize some of my favorite pieces in magazine and web writing from the past 12 months. Inspired by David Brooks’s old Sydney...
Toward a Constructive Public Christianity
“Hello Joshua. I really appreciate the work you do through your podcast. I need a little help if possible.” That’s the start of a listener email that Josh Heavin, writer and co-producer of our podcast “Passages,” received a month ago....
Mere Orthodoxy Best of 2021
As is our custom, we’re going to be doing some year-end wrap ups over the next couple weeks. I’ll have this year’s Eliot Awards up later in the week, God-willing. For now, here’s a run down of the best of Mere...
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 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...
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...