Category: Society
Who’s Your Authority?: Notes on Ideology and Enemies
I don’t think it would be fair to blame my father for his distrust of authority. Growing up in 1960s Jim Crow Alabama, in a hardscrabble, blue-collar family that aspired for white-collar status, he didn’t have particularly good influences. He...
Tethered Still
I am a mother and a theologian. These two facts belong together, inextricable as they are for me and my experience of them. I was pregnant with my first child as I began my doctoral work; I carried her to...
Can Charity Save Justice?
It was an ordinary Sunday afternoon in the Anderson household a few years back, full of books and tea and other comforts. My wife had momentarily interrupted my reading by giving me a kiss, seemingly without cause. It captured just...
Book Review: White Too Long by Robert P. Jones
It is no secret (and impossible, frankly, to say otherwise) that American Christianity has broadly taken the shape that it has because of race. This is not a monocausal argument for American church history which would undermine other factors such...
Book Review: How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi
Racial injustice has become an unavoidable topic for American Christianity. It challenges all levels of relational unity, from large ecclesial networks to personal friendships. When relational unity is challenged and fractured, we naturally search for the source of the problem,...
The Dogma of Minimalist Drama
In his comedy sketch about “Stuff,” George Carlin joked that the whole meaning of life can be described as “Trying to find a place to put your stuff!” After all, that’s what a house is: it’s a “place to keep...
Keeping Vaclav Benda’s Door Open
I don’t think there’s anyone better to explain to Rod Dreher where he went wrong in his recent posts about the death of George Floyd than Rod Dreher. When I wrote to him (Update #8 in that linked post), I...
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...
Ahmaud Arbery and “National Conversations”
Under ordinary circumstances, the arrest of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers might have prompted another national conversation on race, which is what we call it when family members who don’t talk in real life argue on Facebook, and invite long-lost high school...
Keep Christianity Weird
Oliver O’Donovan begins the sixth chapter of his Desire of the Nations, a chapter concerned with the status and legitimacy of Christendom, by considering what made the political witness of the early church compelling: