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Jake MeadorBooks

Reading Ratzinger

Luke has written an obit for the Pope Emeritus over on the main site. So I have little to add to that. I may have something further to say related to Benedict’s passing later, but for now I’m curious to […]

Jake MeadorHistoryEconomicsBooks

Gray on Sociology

Gray: If Positivism is the chief source of the twentieth century’s most powerful secular religions it is partly through its impact on the social sciences. For Positivists, modernity is the transformation of the world by the use of scientific knowledge. […]

Jake MeadorChurchBooks

Schaeffer's Legacy

I am a former L’Abri student. Every time I visit Rochester, MN, I make a point of visiting Dr. Schaeffer’s grave. He’s something of a spiritual grandfather to me. My most treasured book in my home library is a copy […]

Jake MeadorBooks

CS Lewis on Political Idolatries

From Screwtape Letters: Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of the partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and […]

Jake MeadorEconomicsBooksJulius NyererePan-Africanism

Reading the Pan-Africanists: Julius Nyerere (II)

Continuing: The production of wealth, whether by primitive or modern methods, requires three things. First, land. God has given us the land, and it is from the land that we get the raw materials which we reshape to meet our […]

Jake MeadorHistoryEconomicsBooks

Positivism and Universal Free Markets

Gray: The core of Logical Positivism was the development of a scientific worldview. Going further than Saint-Simon and Comte, the Logical Positivists declared that only the verifiable propositions of science have meaning: strictly speaking, religion, metaphysics and morality are nonsense. […]

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 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 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 […]

Jake MeadorBooks

Gray on Modernism

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 MeadorChurchBooks

To Die on the Right Side

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 […]