Category: Culture
D. B. Hart’s Inquisitor
“It is hard to understand the psychology of pious Christians who calmly accept the fact that their neighbors, friends, and relatives will perhaps be damned. I cannot resign myself to the fact that the man with whom I am drinking...
Beauty Spots
…When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need...
Political Modesty, for Better and Worse
Confessional Reformed Protestants are a tiny sliver of the broader Christian community. Still, when it comes to intellectual heft we like to think we punch above our weight. While this may not always be true, David VanDrunen’s decade-long effort to...
First Things and the Problem of Polite Opinion
First Things has been no stranger to controversy in recent years. The latest dispute is about tweets from the magazine’s editors about coronavirus, particularly those of editor-in-chief Rusty Reno.
Race and Black Theology Reading List: An Annotated Bibliography
By the Mere O Editors The ongoing evils of police brutality have revealed to a wider (and whiter) audience the structural and systematic prejudices under which blacks live in the USA, and in many other places around the world. White...
Book Review: Philosopher of the Heart by Clare Carlisle
Søren Kierkegaard still makes people either love him or hate him. Even many who have dedicated their life’s work to studying his authorship approach him biographically with either veneration or suspicion. Some biographies offer rather seraphic portraits of Kierkegaard, whereas...
Natural Law from Noah to Milton Friedman: A Review of David Vandrunen, “Politics after Christendom”
In recent decades, Protestant theologians have rightly restored Natural Law to its vaunted place in their ethical and theological lexicon. Among those legions to be credited with restoring it is David VanDrunen, Robert B. Strimple Professor of Systematic Theology and...
The One God of Katherine Sonderegger
“Theology awakens a grateful heart.”[1] Thus the first words of Katherine Sonderegger’s remarkable Systematic Theology fall. I began reading theology years ago out of a longing to know the Lord. Desire drove study. It still does.
Deus Ex Machina Reversed
J.R.R. Tolkien’s attempted science fiction Time-traveler was began in contest with CS Lewis (who chose to work on space travel). But Tolkien posited the impossibility of time travels, and we see his hostile skepticism toward analogue machine technology when he...
Two Cheers for Gregory’s Augustinian Civic Liberalism
In a recent essay, “Liberalism, the American Right, and the Place of Love in Politics,” Jake Meador attempts to move beyond the terms of the recent, ostensibly existential, debate within American conservatism. The opposition between libertarian proceduralism — represented by...