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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 […]

Jake MeadorChurchBooksNon-Anxious Presence

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

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 MeadorBooks

Gray on the Two Faces of Liberalism

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 MeadorBooksPan-AfricanismKenneth Kaunda

Reading the Pan-Africanists: Kenneth Kaunda (VI)

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 MeadorBooks

You Mostly Shouldn't Write About People You Hate

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 MeadorBooks

Christopher Thompson on New Natural Law

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 MeadorHistoryBooksPan-AfricanismKenneth Kaunda

Reading the Pan-Africanists: Kenneth Kaunda IV

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 MeadorBooks

Book Recommendation: Aggressively Happy by Joy Marie Clarkson

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 […]