Mere Fidelity
Episodes
309 episodes
Replay: The Fractured Republic with Yuval Levin
One of conservatism's brightest policy minds, Yuval Levin, joins us to talk about his book *The Fractured Republic.*—Mere Fidelity is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this work,...
Divided We Stand: On Denominations
How often do you think about denominations? Is this the way Jesus meant for the church to be? Are we actually united without realizing it? Derek, Brad, and Alistair examine the pros and cons of denominations, poke at Rome a little, and pursue a...
How to Read Outside Your Tradition
If you only read what you know you'll agree with, how will you learn? But if you read something from another theological tradition, do you risk weakening your faith? In this episode, James Wood and Joseph Minich explore the importance of readin...
How Theology Nerds Are Made
Derek and Brad interview each other about their foundational theological influences. Which thinkers gave them that spark? How did looking at footnotes lead to unexpected discoveries? What surprising influences led to drastic decisions? By looki...
Magnifica Humanitas with Brad Littlejohn
Last month Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas, which addresses generative AI and the challenges it raises for human dignity, education, just war, good work, and much more. On this episode guest Brad...
Online And Outside the Institutions
A lot of us want institutions to be clean, brave, and instantly fixed and then we join one, try to lead, and discover the painful math of limited power, limited time, and real people. We take that tension head-on by talking about what we’re cal...
Replay: How 1776 Remade The World with Andrew Wilson (Fixed Audio)
1776 gets treated like a patriotic shorthand, but it also works like a master key for the modern world. We sit down with Andrew Wilson to talk about Remaking the World and why one crowded year can illuminate the rise of the post-Christian West ...
Idolatry And The Shape Of Worship
Idolatry is one of those Bible words that can feel obvious until you try to use it carefully. We live far from Baal temples, yet we still talk about idols constantly and sometimes we label everything as an idol until the word loses its bite. De...
The Christian Life with Kelly Kapic
Kelly Kapic's The Christian Life — the newest volume in the New Studies in Dogmatics series — frames Christian living as a response to divine love, arguing that human agency is always Christological and ecclesial before it is personal....
The Desecration of Man with Dr. Carl Trueman
Carl Trueman joins Mere Fidelity to discuss his book The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity. They examine why "des...
Virtues For Living Well with Dr. Alan Noble
What does it mean to live well in morally incoherent times? Alan Noble joins the show to discuss his new book To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times, which uses the four cardinal virtues and three theological ...
On Paul and The Law
Was the Apostle Paul Torah-observant — not just before the Damascus road, but throughout his apostleship to the nations? Brad East stakes out a thesis drawn from Me...
How To Approach God
How do we hold together confidence before God and a proper sense of his holiness? Derek Rishmawy, Alastair Roberts, and Joe Minich take up a pastoral question at the heart of Christian worship and prayer. Working from the Lord's Prayer, the Psa...
Replay: Protestants & History with Paul Gutacker
On this episode of Mere Fidelity, historian of history Paul Gutacker joins Matt, Derek, and Alastair to talk about the changing and sometimes fraught relationship that Protestants have had with the notions of "history" and "tradition." Paul's b...
Between Nature and Grace
Derek Rishmawy, James Wood, and Joseph Minich trace the nature-grace debate from de Lubac's challenge to neoscholastic "pure nature" through Blondel, Bavinck, and B...
Replay: The Age of AI with Jason Thacker
When students started turning in papers written by artificial intelligence, educators were caught flat-footed. We knew that machines would replace many human tasks, but we thought the humanities were immune to that. Have our writing standards f...
The Fall Before The Fall with Philip G. Porter
What if death's presence in the cosmos is not native to creation but a wound running all the way down to its foundations, inflicted before Adam ever reached for the...
What 'Headship' Really Means with Dr. Lyndon Jost
Derek Rishmawy, James Wood, and Alastair Roberts welcome Dr. Lyndon Jost, author of Transfiguring Headship: A Figural Theology of Gender. Jost argues that headship is rooted in Old Testament figural theology rather than Greco...
The Spirituality of Aliens
Derek Rishmawy, Alastair Roberts, and Brad East consider what Christian theology actually has to say about aliens — from the populated Christian cosmos to the angel...
Replay: Put Social Media In Its Place with Andy Crouch
In this Replay episode, Matthew Lee Anderson, Derek Rishmawy, and Alistair Roberts are joined by Andy Crouch — Partner for Theology and Culture at Praxis — to examine what the data on social media and video games reveals about the diverging for...
The Great Evangelical Hand-Off (That Never Happened) with Jake Meador
Derek Rishmawy and Alastair Roberts host Jake Meador for a wide-ranging conversation on why evangelical institutions struggle with leadership transitions and long-t...
Spiritual Formation: A Close Examination
Derek Rishmawy, Alastair Roberts, Brad East, and James Wood trace the evangelical spiritual formation movement from Richard Foster through Dallas Willard to John Mark Comer. They explore why disciplines resonate today amid technological distrac...