Mere Fidelity

Episódios

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  Replay: The Struggle of Prayer 05.08.2026 44min

  Send us Fan Mail Matt, Derek, and Alastair discuss the struggles and misconceptions surrounding prayer: how prayer becomes burdensome, prayer has experiencing God in a veiled way, and what petitions in prayer should we not ask for? Mere Fidelity is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this work, become a Mere Orthodoxy Member today at http://mereorthodoxy.com/membership. Get 30% of the Baker Book of the Month, The Pursuit of Character: Recove...
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  Replay: Conservatism, with Dr. Yoram Hazony 29.07.2026 1h 3min

  Send us Fan Mail What hath Enlightenment Liberalism wrought? According to Dr. Yoram Hazony, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, it has led us to the place we are today where Neo-Marxism is ascendant and we cannot conceive a higher good than consent. What’s the alternative? National Conservatism. Listen to this lively conversation with Derek, Alastair, Matt, and Dr. Hazony. Mere Fidelity is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this ...
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  Measuring Wealth 22.07.2026 53min

  Send us Fan Mail How can each subsequent generation both be making more money and be considerably less wealthy? The answer is obvious. The solution may not be. Mere Fidelity is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this work, become a Mere Orthodoxy Member today at http://mereorthodoxy.com/membership. Get 30% of the Baker Book of the Month, The Pursuit of Character: Recovering the Virtues, by going to: http://bakerbookhouse.com/pages/mere-...
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  Replay: The Fractured Republic with Yuval Levin 15.07.2026 55min

  Send us Fan Mail 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, become a Mere Orthodoxy Member today at http://mereorthodoxy.com/membership. Get 30% of the Baker Book of the Month, The Pursuit of Character: Recovering the Virtues, by going to: http://bakerbookhouse.com/pages/mere-fidelity Mere Fidelity is a ...
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  Divided We Stand: On Denominations 08.07.2026 1h 3min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 authentic catholicity. — Mere Fidelity is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this work, become a Mere Orthodoxy Member today at http://mereorthodoxy.com/membership. Get 30% of the...
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  How to Read Outside Your Tradition 01.07.2026 45min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 reading widely across Christian traditions, the role of ecumenism, and how to deepen your understanding within one's own tradition while remaining open to others. They discuss the value of tradition, truth, and the future of the church in a d...
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  How Theology Nerds Are Made 24.06.2026 1h 3min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 looking at twists and turns that God used to bring them to the understanding they have now, you will be able to examine better what God is doing in your own life. — Mere Fidelity is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-support...
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  Magnifica Humanitas with Brad Littlejohn 17.06.2026 1h 1min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 Littlejohn joins regular co-hosts Derek Rishmawy and Brad East to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the encyclical as well as a host of other related questions. — Mere Fidelity is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. I...
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  Online And Outside the Institutions 10.06.2026 48min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 calling the “Elijah syndrome”: the outsider’s sense that the whole system is compromised and that faithfulness can only exist at a distance. - Mere Fidelity is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to s...
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  Replay: How 1776 Remade The World with Andrew Wilson (Fixed Audio) 03.06.2026 55min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 better than a thousand hot takes about the last decade. We unpack Andrew’s “WEIRDER” framework (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, ex-Christian, romantic) and trace the seven shifts that propel it: globalization, Enli...
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  Idolatry And The Shape Of Worship 27.05.2026 59min

  Send us Fan Mail 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. Derek and Alastair slow down and rebuild the category from the ground up, starting where Scripture starts: the Ten Commandments, the golden calf, and the question of what it means to worship the true God rather than a controllable substit...
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  The Christian Life with Kelly Kapic 20.05.2026 52min

  Send us Fan Mail 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. With Derek Rishmawy, Alastair Roberts, and James Wood. — Mere Fidelity is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this work, become a Mere Orthodoxy Member today at http://mereorthodoxy.com/membersh...
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  The Desecration of Man with Dr. Carl Trueman 13.05.2026 54min

  Send us Fan Mail Carl Trueman joins Mere Fidelity to discuss his book The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity. They examine why "desecration" captures something "disenchantment" misses — the frenzied, ecstatic violation of what is still recognized as sacred — and trace its implications for abortion, gender, technology, and end-of-life ethics. Trueman argues the church's answer is consecration: creed, worship, and a code of hospitality that restores genuine pers...
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  Virtues For Living Well with Dr. Alan Noble 06.05.2026 47min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 virtues as a framework fo...
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  On Paul and The Law 30.04.2026 1h 13min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 Messianic Judaism and the Paul Within Judaism school: that Acts 21 should be read straight, that James is telling the truth about Paul, and that Genesis 12 and 17 still bind Jewish believers. Derek Rishmawy and Alastair Roberts push back hard, working through Galatians 2, 1 Corinthians 9, and the question of whether...
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  How To Approach God 22.04.2026 55min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 Psalms, Job, and John 8, they discuss the dangers of both presumption and paralyzing anxiety, the relationship between knowledge of God and knowledge of self, and why assurance is less a fact we verify than a relation we inhabit. Along the...
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  Replay: Protestants & History with Paul Gutacker 15.04.2026 51min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 book, The Old Faith in a New Nation, particularly examines how nineteenth century debates about slavery, etc., influenced our ideas about the roles of Scripture and Church in regard to history. — Get the free ebook Spiritual Form...
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  Between Nature and Grace 08.04.2026 54min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 Betz's Christ the Logos of Creation — asking what's actually at stake: the gratuity of grace, the coherence of theological anthropology, and the twin dangers of secular dualism and pantheist collapse. — Get Spiritual Formation for the Family ebook for free at http://mereorthodoxy.com/family. Mere Fidelity is a ...
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  Replay: The Age of AI with Jason Thacker 01.04.2026 59min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 fallen so low that we can no longer write better than computers? Or are we about to experience the awakening of Artificial Consciousness? Matt and Alastair discuss this situation with Jason Thacker, the Chair of Research in Technology Et...
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  The Fall Before The Fall with Philip G. Porter 25.03.2026 1h 22min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 fruit? Philip Porter joins Derek Rishmawy, Alastair Roberts, and Brad East to discuss his new book, which retrieves Augustine, Aquinas, Milton, and Tolkien to argue that the angelic fall precedes and precipitates every other form of evil, and that contemporary theology has been too quick to make peace with death....