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Jake MeadorHistoryBook Reviews

On Mr. Berry and Professor Jennings - Commonplaces

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 […]

Jake MeadorBook Reviews

Gray on Modernism - Commonplaces

From Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern: Western societies are governed by the belief that modernity is a single condition, everywhere the same and always benign. As societies become more modern, so they become more alike. At the […]

Jake MeadorChurchBook Reviews

To Die on the Right Side - Commonplaces

Ward, from After Humanity: Lewis thus ardently defends the Tao not so much because it told him how to live, still less because it entitled him to tell other people how to live, but because it told him how to view […]

Jake MeadorChurchBook ReviewsNon-Anxious Presence

Reading Mark Sayers's "A Non-Anxious Presence" - Commonplaces

That we live in a time of uncertainty and unique challenge is at this point widely accepted, I think. Call it the “negative age” if you like, or an ecclesial winter, or, better still in my view, a “gray zone.” […]

Jake MeadorBook Reviews

Gray on the Two Faces of Liberalism - Commonplaces

So I first heard mention of John Gray on a recent episode of Rebuilders. Then I mentioned it in our writers’ Slack and found out that a few folks in there were already big fans of Gray’s work while another […]

Jake MeadorBook ReviewsPan-AfricanismKenneth Kaunda

Reading the Pan-Africanists: Kenneth Kaunda (VI) - Commonplaces

Here Kaunda is discussing military rule and why he sees it as a dead end for newly independent African nations. (Military rule mostly came in with the second generation of dictators, such as Idi Amin and Mobutu, and usually with […]

Jake MeadorBook ReviewsPan-AfricanismKenneth Kaunda

Reading the Pan-Africanists: Kenneth Kaunda (VI) - Commonplaces

Here Kaunda is discussing military rule and why he sees it as a dead end for newly independent African nations. (Military rule mostly came in with the second generation of dictators, such as Idi Amin and Mobutu, and usually with […]

Jake MeadorBook Reviews

You Mostly Shouldn't Write About People You Hate - Commonplaces

A thought provoked by Miles’s column at World in which he says: What made McCullough so different from his critics is that he maintained affection and charity towards the United States and its peoples despite its flawed history. McCullough had the […]

Jake MeadorBook Reviews

Christopher Thompson on New Natural Law - Commonplaces

Christopher Thompson, author of what looks to be a fascinating book on natural law and ecological care, on the failure of New Natural Law (this is an excerpt from the Friday Feature of Mars Hill Audio, which you need to […]

Jake MeadorHistoryBook ReviewsPan-AfricanismKenneth Kaunda

Reading the Pan-Africanists: Kenneth Kaunda IV - Commonplaces

The whole chapter on nationalism is fascinating reading, especially if the main forms of nationalism you’re familiar with are European forms or the muddled thing we have here in America. African nationalism, this explosive force which has changed the shape […]

Jake MeadorBook Reviews

Book Recommendation: Aggressively Happy by Joy Marie Clarkson - Commonplaces

Joy has written the book that I wish had existed when I was in college so my college pastor or church pastor could have given it to me and saved us all a lot of time and expense on coffeeshops and […]

Jake MeadorChurchBook Reviews

Dawson on the Other-Worldliness of Christianity - Commonplaces

Dawson: But though the religion of that age was intensely other-worldly, its other-worldliness had a very different character from much that we have come to associate with the word in its modern pietist form. It was collective rather than individualist, […]