Archive

Well, I didn't make the first Friday. But here we are.

The Work

Print #2 is scheduled to ship out on Tuesday. So that one is done and dusted and we're onto issue 3, which is now being edited. We have a number of pieces I'm really excited about in this one. Leah Sargeant has written a great piece about how to value caring work, Tessa Carman has a lengthy interview with Paul Kingsnorth, and Charlie Clark has written for us about the idea of "good work." We also have an essay from Andrew Arndt on the Magnificat that I'm excited about along with a number of book reviews. It should be a great issue. A few pieces are already being copy edited, the rest are being revised by authors. We're in good shape, it appears, to have this out to subscribers by late May.

Print #4 is now in the works as I have pitches out to a number of authors and have about half the magazine already commissioned while I wait to hear from everyone else. The theme will be "de-radicalization." One of the core concerns we have at Mere Orthodoxy is preserving virtues of neighborliness, persuasion, and patience in a time of noise, ideology, and anger. So this issue will align well with those goals. Jess Joustra is going to be writing the cover essay on what we can learn from Herman Bavinck about staying centered during tumultuous times. Print #4 will mark the end of volume 1 of the print edition of Mere O.

Hey y'all,

I've decided I'm going to do these on a monthly basis simply because I don't think there's much need for anything more regular than that. I may copy the cadence a close friend uses and make this a first Friday letter in the future. But as we've already missed first Friday in March, we're sending this one out today.

The Work

I'm going to start with some work updates as most of you on this list know me mostly for my work, though I'm also going to include some personal updates near the end.

Hey y'all,

It's been two years since I sent anything to this list. I'm planning to revive it again, but more in the style of Edith Schaeffer's old family letters that she would send to friends of L'Abri, the Christian commune that she and her husband Francis ran in Switzerland for many years. So this won't really be a journalistic endeavor--all my work of that sort is going to continue to be at Mere O or on my personal blog.

This will be more a place for friends of Mere O to get personal updates from me about my work and what's going on with Mere O. If you're interested in the work we're doing at Mere O, which is just part of the broader work of renewal needed in the church today, stick around. If you were signing up for this expecting it to be more like a Substack, you can go ahead and unsubscribe now. My hope is to start using this as a recurring "Friends of Mere O" letter next week.

Thanks, everyone.

Hey all,

Here is the latest.

First, I would appreciate your prayers today as I have three different interviews scheduled to promote Common Good. The first is a morning show on My Faith radio that airs in Minnesota and the Dakotas. By the time you get this I’ll already be done with that one. Then I’m recording two podcasts later today, one with the Catalyst podcast and the other with Daniel Darling of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Hey all,

So we are one week into the launch of . If you have already bought it, thank you! If you haven’t, you can find it on IVP’s website or on Amazon. Joie called our local Barnes and Noble last week and it sounds like they aren’t getting their copies in till today so you may find it in local stores this week if you’d rather support a local business with your purchase.

Hey all,

So this week is the launch for In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World. You can order the book at all the usual online vendors, though I would encourage you to either buy it from a local bookstore or from the publisher directly.

Hey all, we’re just going to dive straight in today because there’s a lot of ground I’m going to try to cover.

Last time we defined “liberalism” and “common life.”

“Liberalism” is a social order premised on the idea of individual autonomy, a right to self-definition that cannot be justly violated.

“Common life” meanwhile is a general term for the various ways of living that groups of people develop and share with one another. So liberalism would be what you could call a very thin theory of common life. We’re trying to develop a more robust theory in this newsletter-and I’m trying to also do the same work in a number of other projects, most notably over at Mere Orthodoxy and in coming out next month.

Hey all,

First, if the newsletter looks a bit different it’s because I have migrated over to a new email client called ButtonDown. The content will be the same on your end. It may just look a little different. But I think the more barebones look suits me anyway.

The Lede

In virtually every project I’ve ever attempted, the work has announced itself to me before a business model. The result of all this is that I’ve done lots of what I hope is good work and made what I know is very little money. The funny thing with a newsletter is that the business model is pretty easy–charge a subscription fee–but the product has been the difficult thing for me.