Category: Featured
Book Review: The Kingdom of God Has No Borders by Melani McAlister
By John Thomas In her book released last summer, The Kingdom of God Has No Borders, author and George Washington University Professor of American Studies and International Affairs, Melani McAlister recounts the last 50 years of evangelical history through the...
Responding to Dr. Wayne Grudem on In Vitro Fertilization
Within the pantheon of ‘difficult issues to disagree upon,’ nothing ranks higher than in vitro fertilization. Or so I have concluded recently, anyway. Opposing gay marriage means one will probably get tarred as a bigot, and dismissed and derided accordingly—which...
Sex and the Supremacy of Technique
Last week’s essay from Matthew Lee Anderson and Andrew Walker about evangelicals and in vitro fertilization makes an argument worth discussing: God intends that sex and procreation should not be separated from each other. It made me think of the...
The Protestant World of Shakespeare
By E. J. Hutchinson It is a monstrous waste of time to try to convince oneself, rocking anxiously back and forth in one’s pajamas, that William Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic—or a Protestant. It is difficult to imagine a more...
The Evangelical Innovators C. S. Lewis Warned Us About
In 1943, C. S. Lewis published The Abolition of Man in an attempt to warn the world about the Innovators, educators who were corrupting the minds of children, turning them into “men without chests.” If Lewis were to write again...
Political Objectives and Policies Are Different Things: On Being Consistently Pro-Life
By Stephen Wolfe It is not enough nowadays to be pro-life; you must be consistently pro-life. If you truly care for life, then you must care for all of life − both in and out of the womb. That is,...
The Church’s One Foundation and the Fire at Notre Dame Cathedral
By Joshua Heavin Upon initially hearing there was a fire at Cathédrale Notre-Dame, I assumed that perhaps some light smoke damage would be incurred; such a titanic vessel must be unsinkable, and our sophisticated modern technology will undoubtedly prevent any...
On Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”
By E. J. Hutchinson Why do we read poetry? Why should we? April is National Poetry Month, so it makes sense to take advantage of it to introduce a new series on poetry at Mere Orthodoxy. Its objective is simple:...
The End of Christendom: Notes on the Burning of Notre Dame
Rod Dreher is fond of quoting a line from Benedict XVI who—forgive my paraphrasing—has said that the church’s two most powerful evangelistic tools are her art and her saints. Though I have never been fully outside the church, even during...
Natural Law and the Prospects of Persuasion
By James Clark When American evangelicals began to earnestly engage in conventional politics in the 1950s, a problem emerged. As David L. Weeks put it in a 2001 article, “Evangelicals have never developed a coherent and compelling political philosophy. Instead,...