This week Alastair, Derek, and Matt take up and read Book 1 of Augustine’s Confessions. If you’d like to read along–which we encourage you to do–Henry Chadwick’s translation is available widely at a reasonable price.
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Soli Deo Gloria
On this episode, Matt and I and our Mere-Orthodoxy’s friend Jake Meador discuss the implications of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ for political theology. I had a lot of fun with this talk.
If you like the show, please do leave us a review on iTunes. We are also available on Google Play.
If you’re interested in supporting the show financially, you can check out our Patreon here.
Soli Deo Gloria
This week on Mere Fidelity, we had the immense privilege of having Yuval Levin join us to discuss his important book The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in an Age of Individualism. If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. It is one of the most interesting non-theological reads I’ve made in a while. In any case, on the show we discuss the problems of nostalgia in politics, our post-nationalist scene, the dynamics of a post-Brexit, post-Trump order, the way class ought to figure into our analysis, and so much more. Honestly, this is one of my favorite episodes.
If you like the show, please do leave us a review on iTunes. We are also available on Google Play.
If you’re interested in supporting the show financially, you can check out our Patreon here.
Soli Deo Gloria
This week we finally decided to take up the election, so we had the President of the Colson Center, John Stonestreet, on to chat with us. The election will be here in two weeks, so the we figured it was about time. More specifically, we took up a couple of related questions. First, what are some of the ethical issues involved for particular voters? What should people be pondering as we enter the voting booth?
The other, possibly more interesting one was what are we going to do with each other after the election. Tensions have run high among Christians this year. The behavior of some of our putative leaders has surprised and appalled us. What will reconciliation look like on the other side? What about responsibility? We might forgive, but need we trust them?
We hope this conversation sheds more light than it does heat.
If you’re interested in supporting the show (you know, with money), you can check out our Patreon here.
Soli Deo Gloria
In this week’s episode of Mere Fidelity, Alastair, Andrew, and I get together to discuss Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations thesis, as laid out in his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.When I read it a couple of years ago, it was instantly the most illuminating books I’d read on interpreting our social situation with regard to discourse between right and life, progressive and conservative, (both in religion and politics). Revisiting the conversation with the chaps on the show nuanced some of my earlier judgments, but I still think it’s absolutely worth your time to engage with.
Hopefully this discussion is informative in itself, but also whets your appetite for more.
Soli Deo Gloria
A couple of weeks ago, Alan Jacobs wrote a widely-discussed piece on the disappearance of the “Christian Intellectual” from the public scene. We thought it was a great piece, but we wanted to take a deeper stab at the issue. So here are Matt, Andrew, Alastair, and I analyzing and arguing with Jacobs, each other, and possibly persons unknown.
We hope you enjoy it as much as we did. What’s more, we hope our small conversation contributes in some small way to the very important one Dr. Jacobs has begun.
Soli Deo Gloria
This week on Mere Fidelity we took up the ever-pressing issue of apophatic or negative theology (Don’t say “God is…”, say “God is not…”). To do so, we invited Dr. David Wilmington on to discuss the nature, the limits, and the proper uses of apophatic theology, especially some of the more contemporary forms drinking from the well of postmodern influences like Derrida and so forth. At core, we discuss the issue of language for God and knowledge of the God who transcends language, yet reveals himself in Scripture, nonetheless. This is an admittedly nerdy one, but we think it’s worth your time.
Soli Deo Gloria
It’s election season again, which means that politics is on our mind more than it usually is. But is it too much? This episode of Mere Fidelty, Matt, Alastair, and I discuss the problem of political engagement and obsession in the church. We take up issues like the disconnect between different political and theological classes, the work of James Davison Hunter & the culture war syndrome, the problem of loudest voice in the room, instrumentalizing the faith, and so forth. And we even give Alastair a fantastic new nickname. You won’t want to miss this one.
Soli Deo Gloria
This week on Mere Fidelity, we have the full cast and crew on to talk about the point of weekly worship. What is it about? Is Evangelism part of the central purposes or is that a secondary concern? How does this affect the way we go about thinking through our services and the broader church programs surrounding them?
Also, we make fun of Andrew for being an UK televangelist now.
Kids, the Superbowl is coming up, so being the athletes that we are, we decided to take up the subject of Football (American style) for conversation. Matt, Alastair, and I invited Matt Millsap (professor of Christian studies at Midwestern Baptist) to come on and join us.
The premise is basically this: given the recent studies about the long-term damage to players’ mental and emotional health, is it moral to watch the sport or support it? Should changes be made to the way the game is played? Should our kids play it? Should we listen to anything Alastair says on the subject given the fact that he loves cricket and was probably knitting while we discussed this?
I’ll leave it for you to decide after you give it a listen.
Soli Deo Gloria
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