Did education give you a love of learning, a delight in the world, a desire to cultivate your mind over a lifetime? Or did you learn how to pass tests to graduate and get a job?
These goals don’t need to be mutually exclusive, but they are for many of us. Any serious attempt at reforming Christian political witness must include a vision for education. Jake Meador offers such a classical vision for education but also ventures into sex, race, technology, family, the environment, and more in his new book, What Are Christians For? Life Together at the End of the World.
For such a small book, What Are Christians For? offers a hint in the title of Jake’s big ambitions. He sees fundamental flaws in modern conceptions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For example, he writes, “The reason our moral lives are guided by the letter of the law is because that is all the revolution of the past centuries has left us with once it has destroyed nature and rejected God.”
Jake Meador is editor in chief of Mere Orthodoxy, a magazine covering the Christian faith in the public sphere. In this book, he offers hopeful alternatives, but not a mass-scale solution. In some ways, his ambitions for a better political witness seem reasonable. He writes, “Ordinary people living faithful lives together in a place, bearing up under what cannot be helped and laboring to resolve what can, offer us a vision of how a renewed Christian society could begin.” That’s a vision I can get behind.
Meador joined me on this episode of Gospelbound to discuss industrialism, technology, debt, whiteness, and more.
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