Even Now, Faithful Presence

October 8th, 2025 | 19 min read

This is a lightly edited manuscript of a talk I gave last week at Trinity Classical Academy in Omaha, NE.

Last Sunday night I opened up a chat app I sometimes use to stay in touch with friends and saw reports of a man armed with an AK-47 reportedly roaming about on campus at a prominent evangelical college in western Pennsylvania. A friend of mine who teaches there was included in the chat and several of us had asked him what was going on. Eventually we got the reply: Apparently there were a series of fraudulent calls placed to SWAT teams in the western Pennsylvania area that day.

true true

Want to keep reading?

Subscribe for free to access this article and all of our resources.

Jake Meador

Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, First Things, Books & Culture, National Review, Comment, Books & Culture, and Christianity Today. He is a contributing editor with Plough and a contributing writer at the Dispatch. He lives in his hometown of Lincoln, NE with his wife and four children.

Topics:

Culture

Formation

Even Now, Faithful Presence

Want to keep reading?

From Libertarian to Authoritarian: The Devolution of Evangelical Politics

Marilynne Robinson's Simple Wisdom

The State of the Internet: 2026

A Conversation with Andrew Peterson About the Music of Rich Mullins

The Sacred and the Profane

The Empty Promises of Sentimentalism

A Gift Shared With My People, 597 A.D.

In Relation to God: A World Down Syndrome Day Reflection

We Are All Dwight Schrute Now: The Rise of the Facebook Deputy

What to Learn from the Decline of Young Earth Creationism

10 Reasons Evangelicals are Cringe

James Talarico's Gospel

Liturgies of the Wild and Non-Expressivist Religion

The Plight of the Protestant Scholar

White Hot Hate

A Christian Vision for Ordered Welcome

Elites and the Evangelical Class War

The Promise of a Christian Small Magazine

Who Is Rich and Who Is Poor?

In This House of Death: What Does Sanctity of Human Life Month Mean in 2026?

You can't clear cut political society.

A Framework for Faithful Ministry Leadership

The Christian Achievement of Martin Luther King Jr.

Why Populism is a Problem for the Intellectual Right

The Rise of the Skilled (and Lonely) Consumer