looking for better mind-readers
There is a strain of commentary that has been more or less constant for the past decade or so, and its thesis is basically thus: A certain group of Christians, by virtue of their cultural position, are embarrassed by the...
a few different and possibly useful categories of idea-expressers
Here is a list roughly in ascending order of how much attention I think these different sorts of people who express their ideas deserve. You, of course, have every right to engage with ideas and the people who express them...
could i interest you in everything all of the time? [because everything is the same]
By now you’ve probably watched “Welcome to the Internet”, Bo Burnham’s hilariously disturbing song about… well, the Internet. It’s funny, but I’ve stopped laughing at the jokes but still keep listening to it. If you haven’t already seen it and...
things that can be true at the same time
I’ve made these points at greater length in other essays, but I can’t seem to get people who disagree to push back in a meaningful way. So I’m trying a different strategy, for the skeptics who seem to think that...
an alternative ethic
In the current context, where everyone is talking about the world as a global village, it is important to undertake an exploration into the particularities of the indigenous world view of Africa. We wish to sample them because they have...
Public Education, Justice, and Solidarity
Firing up the ol’ blog machine (in no small part because the excellent Tara Isabella Burton has joined the Mere-O world) for a series of disjointed thoughts on this Atlantic piece about a family that tried to escape the insane...
“You have got to feed the biology of the soil.”
I have long been interested in the work of the Land Institute and their perennial crops, so I appreciated this story about how people are trying to use them: “Mainstream agriculture, they just don’t get it,” says Jerry Doan, standing...
exposing the wounds in the Church
I really wish this New Yorker profile of Karen Swallow Prior had been about three times as long, but it’ll have to do for now: The next morning, we shared a breakfast of scrambled eggs with some venison that Roy had...
whither conservatism?
While there’s a lot more that could be said and a lot of things that could be said differently (as I hope to in a forthcoming essay for Mere-O), I appreciated this assessment from Timothy Shenk at Dissent of where things are...
“legalizing marijuana won’t solve those disparities”
I found this interview with Alex Berenson, who just wrote a new book about the dangers of marijuana, very interesting and well-balanced: TMP: In your Times op-ed, you suggest that the ominous scholarly findings have been ignored thanks to legalization advocates...