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Jake MeadorHistoryBook Reviews

Gray and the Deeply Modern Bolsheviks - Commonplaces

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 - Commonplaces

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 […]

Miles SmithFeaturedHistoryCurrent Politics

A Puritan Founding? - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

Earlier this year Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry published The Flag + the Cross, a sociological expose on what they identified as the threat to American democracy from what they called white Christian nationalism. It’s a work of sociology more […]

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 […]

David MooreFeaturedHistory

Stuck in the Present - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

(Scroll to the bottom to learn about a free book giveaway.) Let me say a few words about the title, Stuck in the Present: How History Frees and Forms Christians. I find many Christians uninterested in the study of history. […]

Jake MeadorHistoryChurchCommunitiesPan-AfricanismKenneth Kaunda

Reading the Pan-Africanists: Kenneth Kaunda V - Commonplaces

More on nationalism: The leader must recognize that politics alone do not create a nation; a whole network of cultural, religious and social factors play an important role. Nation-building, therefore, is not solely a political operation, active encouragement must also […]

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 MeadorHistoryPan-AfricanismKenneth Kaunda

Reading the Pan-Africanists: Kenneth Kaunda III - Commonplaces

It’s from 1966 and Zambia but, dang, if parts of this don’t map eerily well onto the “racial reconciliation” discourse. It is truly tragic the fear which has been engendered in European minds because they now find themselves ruled by […]

Miles SmithPoliticsFeaturedHistory

The Danger of Forgetting America's Anti-Racist History - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

Jake Meador has offered a thoughtful and challenging piece concerning the relationship between Christianity and the United States. Meador’s most salient point is that he has “become very suspicious of accounts of Christianity’s place in American life that leave out […]

Ashley HalesFeaturedHistoryJournalJournal 2

Who is This New Man? - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

The rubber band of our American common life is stretched to breaking.[1] Our connections are tenuous, our politics polarizing, and our sense of civic housekeeping — where we provide for others for the common good — seems like a foreign […]

David MooreFeaturedHistory

The Transcendentalists and Their World - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

Robert A. Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. His widely regarded book, The Minutemen and Their World won the Bancroft Prize. The following interview revolves around […]

Matthew LoftusFamilyCultureHistoryEthicsEconomicsEducation

the liberal order and its haters - Doctors Without Boredom

What we mean when we talk about "the liberal order" or "liberalism" and why it's destroying us.