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500 Years of Women in Art — in 3 Minutes
A lovely video slide-show has shown up on YouTube which runs through 500 years worth of paintings depicting feminine beauty. The viewing experience is quite mesmerizing, as the video’s creator melds...
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Arguing with George William Curtis
I’d never heard of George William Curtis before this past Saturday. A quote of his popped up on my friend’s facebook wall, in what I assume to be a strange way of pepping himself up for the US/Ghana...
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Were the 1960s when it all went wrong?
I am really pleased to welcome Matthew Tuininga to Mere-O. A Ph.D. candidate at Emory University, Matthew is one of the sharpest young Christian voices working at the intersection of religion and...
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Two scholars debate violence and the nation state
In the past month there has been a fascinating exchange going on between occasional Mere O contributor Brad Littlejohn and DePaul’s William Cavanaugh. It started with this critique of Cavanaugh’s work...
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The Evangelical Roots of the Benedict Option
In 1948 the Bible Presbyterian Church, a quasi-fundamentalist evangelical denomination, sent a 36-year-old pastor and his family to Europe to check on the state of the church after World War II. The...
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Reviewing John Wilsey’s “American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion”
I’m pleased to publish this guest review today by Hillsdale College visiting professor Dr. Miles Smith. You can learn more about Dr. Smith from his bio below this post. You can also follow him on...
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Hamilton, Meritocracy, and Patriotism
I held out for as long as I could. My resistance was sustained chiefly by a stubborn contrarianism that resists as many trends as possible, particularly those that can be credibly connected to New...
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Reviewing Nancy Isenberg’s “White Trash”
This guest review is by Dr. Miles Smith. In 2014 The King’s College professor Anthony Bradley wrote an article on the plight of poor whites for World Magazine. That Bradley, an African American, first...
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Are Religious Liberty Restrictions God’s Judgment on Racism?
“I gave you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and lack of bread in all your places, yet you did not return to me,” declares the LORD. – Amos 4:6 I did a number of medical school rotations in a...
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How to Deal With Erratic Corpulent Ginger Authoritarian Much-Married Rulers:...
Note: Some of these Options are better than others. The Wolsey Option Through an excess of personal ambition, tie your whole career to the favor of an unpredictable and potentially vicious master....
View ArticleOn Presidential Politics and Evangelical Cultural Clout
If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to circle back around to Emma Green’s review of Rod’s book while also linking it to Katelyn Beaty’s review of the same published earlier this week in the Washington...
View ArticleThe “New Alarmism” is not new and is not alarmism.
When asked about the Holy Roman Empire the French philosophe Voltaire once quipped that said empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. I had something like that thought while reading Dr. James...
View ArticleTheologians Were Arguing About the Benedict Option 35 Years Ago
Getting historical perspective on a contemporary topic of debate is always helpful. Dr. Christopher Cleveland’s essay for us on the trinitarian controversy last summer is exceptional precisely because...
View ArticlePolis/Counter-polis: On the Civic Benedict Option
October 2016 was a simpler, more innocent time. We were all youths, wet behind the ears; we look back at ourselves with a kind of bemused affection. Rod Dreher assumed, surely—we all assumed—that...
View ArticleW. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk–Chapter 2 Overview
One of the main points Du Bois is developing throughout his book is that, to quote him directly, “the defining problem of the 20th century [was] the color line.” He continues to develop this point in...
View ArticleW. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk–Chapter 3
We’re continuing our exploration of Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk today with a brief overview of chapter three. Chapter three may well be one of the most timely in the entire book. Though primarily...
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American History, Structural Racism, NFL Protests, and the Kingdom of God
I’m pleased to publish this piece from Michael Graham. It’s a bit meandering, but what it does well is define terms, place the debate within a broader context, and walk through the steps of the...
View ArticleNotes on Edgardo Mortara from a Protestant Onlooker
Last week First Things, as the colloquialism earthily says, stepped in it. The occasion for this unpleasantness was the publication of an essay by Romanus Cessario, O.P., arguing that the church was...
View ArticleBook Review: The Life of Roman Republicanism by Joy Connolly
By Coyle Neal In some ways, Dr. Joy Connolly’s introduction to the formal study of Rome mirrors my own. “I began to study the republican tradition in earnest in 2001, at a time when the promise of...
View ArticleThe Protestant World of Shakespeare
By E. J. Hutchinson It is a monstrous waste of time to try to convince oneself, rocking anxiously back and forth in one’s pajamas, that William Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic—or a Protestant. It is...
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