Contributor

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.

Jake MeadorHistoryBooks

Gray and the Deeply Modern Bolsheviks

John Gray: The roots of the Soviet system were in the Enlightenment’s most utopian dreams. Lenin never gave up the belief that, after a period of revolutionary terror, the state would be abolished. Trotsky defended the taking and killing of […]

Jake MeadorHistoryCommunities

In Memoriam: Queen Elizabeth II

In the climactic scene of the 1998 movie The Truman Show, the protagonist, a man named Truman and played by Jim Carrey, has recently discovered that this entire life has been a TV show lived out inside a gigantic dome […]

Jake MeadorChurch

Christendom in Winter

There’s a certain sort of mainline Protestant, blessedly rare these days so far as I can tell, who has at times argued that while Scripture might teach that such and such is the Christian teaching on sexuality, we must adapt […]

Jake MeadorFeaturedCultureCulture War

Panic

My friend Rod Dreher recently argued from his blog that we have hit a point in the trans revolution where a moral panic is appropriate, saying:

Jake MeadorChurch

Small Groups, Church Life, and Being Human

A striking and depressing stat, this: 20% of people in the US have no extended family within a 1-hour drive (among those who have any extended family). The proximity varies most by race/ethnicity and education. pic.twitter.com/4POlHWndon — Demographic Fact A […]

Jake MeadorFamilyFeaturedFormation

Threnody for a Good Man

Mat Feltner died at a hospital in Lincoln this week. Obviously it wasn’t Feltner himself — he lives nowhere outside of the mind of Wendell Berry, the pages of his novels, and the imaginations of the many thousands of us […]

Jake MeadorChurch

Perspective

Some real talk: On a typical Sunday here in Lincoln, I would bet good money that there are more folks in PCA churches than there are PC(USA). 20 years ago, that would have been insane—but thanks to God’s kindness to […]

Jake MeadorChurchBooks

Reading "Non-Anxious Presence" (II)

Before getting into more prescriptive analysis in his later chapters, Sayers spends the first chapter developing his concept of a “gray zone.” To begin, The pandemic, cultural change, political polarization, and technological disruption have rapidly altered the world we live […]

Jake MeadorChurch

New Coalitions

Though it is common now, and quite understandable, to lament the relationships and institutions that have been changed and broken over the past seven years, I also think it’s worth keeping our eyes open to the relationships and coalitions being […]

Jake Meador

Two Bad Reasons to Oppose Loan Debt Forgiveness and Two Better Ones

Briefly: Bad Objections 1. “I paid all my debt back and it isn’t fair that other people shouldn’t have to do the same.” In interests of disclosure, I have already paid off about 95% of my student loan debt and […]

Jake MeadorBooksJulius NyererePan-Africanism

Reading the Pan-Africanists: Julian Nyerere (I)

I’ve finished Kaunda. Now on to Nyerere, a contemporary of Kaunda’s who was the first president of Tanzania, serving from 1964 to 1985. I’m reading his book Socialism, which is a collection of addresses and papers he wrote in the early […]

Jake MeadorHistoryBooks

On Mr. Berry and Professor Jennings

In his critique of my discussion of “whiteness” in the book, my friend Scott Pryor observes that it seems as if I’m shifting away from Wendell Berry’s critique of modernity and toward Willie James Jennings’s. On one hand, in Chapter […]