As of today, I am officially on holiday. I have some content scheduled to go up to remind you how little you miss me, but other than what I can put together in the next few days, I'll see you in mid-July.
In the meantime, you'll be kept busy by a few guest voices. You've already met Jake Meador--he'll be joined by Christopher Benson, who has been commenting around Mere-O for a little while now. Christopher is incredibly well read and a very careful thinker. His only two faults are that he's more sympathetic to post-modernism than I tend to be, and he graduated from.....Wheaton College. One of those is forgivable. I'll let you choose which.*
CHRISTOPHER BENSON is a writer and humanities educator in Denver. He writes for conservative publications (The Weekly Standard, National Review) and Christian publications (Books & Culture, Christianity Today, Christian Scholar's Review, The City, Image, Modern Reformation, The Christian Century). His blog posts can be found at Evangel.
As a graduate of Wheaton College, Missouri School of Journalism, and St. John's College, Christopher has an omnivorous appetite for learning that is driven by what literary critic Harold Bloom calls "the search for a difficult pleasure." His vocational passion lies at the intersection of great books and human lives, where dialogue-partners pursue truth, beauty, and goodness, cultivating habits of mind, such as "a deepened capacity for reflective thought, an ability to transcend the limits of their own horizons, an appreciation of the persisting questions of human existence, an abiding respect for the value of serious conversation, and a lasting love of inquiry."
His principal interests are philosophy (Aristotle, Plato, Pascal, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus), theology (Augustine, Calvin, Barth), drama (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Tennessee Williams), poetry (Homer, Virgil, Dante, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Goethe, Dickinson, Frost), literature (Austen, Eliot, Cather), and cultural criticism (Neil Postman, Andrew Delbanco, James Davison Hunter, Terry Eagleton).
*This is a joke. Neither of them are really forgivable.
Matthew Lee Anderson
Matthew Lee Anderson is an Associate Professor of Ethics and Theology in Baylor University's Honors College. He has a D.Phil. in Christian Ethics from Oxford University, and is a Perpetual Member of Biola University's Torrey Honors College. In 2005, he founded Mere Orthodoxy.
