Category: Featured

I Am iPhone: How Our Tech Endangers Our Relationships
We’re pleased to publish this guest post from Brian Mesimer. Certain family therapy theorists maintain that when you are working with a couple, there are always three people in the room to consider: the man, the woman, and the relationship itself....

Pastoral Care and the Trauma of Life: a Reformed Evangelical Approach
We’re pleased to publish this guest feature from Patrick Stefan. Hello. My name is Patrick and I’m going to trust you with a story. I don’t know you, but my hope is that you are reading this piece for the...

Reviewing Rod Dreher’s “The Benedict Option”
Fair Warning: This is long. But I’ve tried to break it up with some header tags that make it easy to scan on an initial read. The review basically falls into three parts: The paragraphs between “Introduction” and “What is...

Theologians Were Arguing About the Benedict Option 35 Years Ago
There’s been quite a bit of controversy lately. Perhaps you’ve heard about it. The uproar surrounds a set of proposals regarding the state of American society and the character of the church in its midst. Let me give you some...

The “New Alarmism” is not new and is not alarmism.
When asked about the Holy Roman Empire the French philosophe Voltaire once quipped that said empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. I had something like that thought while reading Dr. James K. A. Smith’s piece for the...

On Gratitude and the Fifth Commandment
We are pleased to publish this guest feature from Dr. Eric Hutchinson of Hillsdale College. In my first two posts, we’ve seen what the classical two-kingdoms distinction was for the sixteenth century Reformers, whether “Lutheran” or “Reformed,” and also the...

Our Middlebury Moment
Last week, professor Charles Murray, a right-leaning social scientist, was invited onto the campus of Middlebury College in Vermont. As has been frequently the case at many universities over the last few years, student-led protests erupted in disapproval of Murray’s...

Lent, Individualism, and Christian Piety–An Email Conversation
Given that today is Ash Wednesday, it seemed appropriate to republish this email conversation that Alastair Roberts and I had which was first published in 2014. Introduction Recently my friend and occasional Mere O contributor Alastair Roberts exchanged a few...

Do Evangelicals Actually Want an Originalist on the Supreme Court?
We’re pleased to publish this guest feature by Matt Mellema and Ian Speir. President Trump’s tapping of Judge Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court has won near-universal praise from the Religious Right. Gorsuch has been lauded as an articulate originalist,...

Freeing Speech: Free Speech, Milo, and the University
A peculiar and noteworthy feature of our cultural conversations around the subject of free speech is their narrow focus upon the non-proscription of expression. If we were to employ Isaiah Berlin’s taxonomy, we could say that these conversations have framed...