Category: Writing
Does Maturity Still Matter?
I’ve been reading Mark Sayers’s interesting book A Non-Anxious Presence, and was particularly struck by this passage: As a network is swamped by chronic anxiety, it is marked by reactivity. Those within the system no longer act rationally, but rather,...
Following Christ in the Machine Age: A Conversation with Paul Kingsnorth
How do we stay human in a technocratic age? How do we live rooted lives —spiritually and otherwise — in an unsettled time? How do we make sense of life in the modern world? English writer Paul Kingsnorth has been...
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...
2020 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...
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.
Mere Orthodoxy Best of 2019
Here is our annual list of the top pieces we published in 2019 and the general year in writing at Mere O. January Can We Reject Paedobaptism and Still Receive Paedobaptists? Several of our most read pieces this year came...
The 2019 Eliot Awards
Each year in December we publish our Eliot Awards at Mere Orthodoxy for excellence in long-form writing over the past 12 months. You can read our previous editions using the links below: 2018 Eliot Awards 2017 Eliot Awards We will...
The 2018 Eliot Awards
We started this last year and I’m going to continue it this year because of how much fun I have putting it together. Here’s my list of the year’s best magazine writing. If you have other nominations, mention them in...
The 2017 Eliot Awards
For the longest time one of my favorite year-end rituals has been combing through David Brooks’s Sydney Award winners for the year to find which ones I’d missed and to re-read favorites from earlier in the year.
A Note on Publishing at Mere O
Hey all, short update: I’m going to post three essays over the first three days of this week—the first will go live a few minutes after this post. After the last one goes live on Wednesday, I will be going...