Religion | Religious News - www.mreligion.com

A recent SCOTUS decision has clarified what “undue hardship” means for employers asked to modate religious employees. It’s long overdue, and rather than creating some new “preference,” it ensures that the original intention of the First Amendment is respected. Read More… As it turns out, the Supreme Court last week opted against transforming the United States into a totalitarian, theocratic hellscape like the New York Times’ Linda Greenhouse had prophesied in January. In fact, the entire left wing of the...

Is Mere ‘Tolerance’ Intolerable?

A word like tolerance is often waved about as a symbol of open-mindedness and laudable fairness. But when it is a mere cultural expedient—a Pilate-like “What is truth?”—it can lead to an awful resentment and the worst kind of intolerance. Read More… Berlin is a city saturated with history. Everywhere—on every corner, in every park, behind every wall and in every building—one stumbles on a piece of that which once was, scattered by the wind of time and silently reminding...

The Forever (Catholic) Philosophy

How do we know what’s real? For that matter, how do we know what we know? An introduction to philosophy in the Catholic tradition is a great place to look for answers. Read More… If you are looking for an accessible introduction to philosophy in the Catholic tradition, James M. Jacobs’ new book, Seat of Wisdom, is a great place to begin. To be sure, any entrance into philosophy takes patience and hard thinking, and Jacobs’ book is no exception,...

Sound of Freedom Is a Clarion Call for More Christians in the Arts

The box office success of this Jim Caviezel–starring true story of a Christian hero has gladdened the hearts of conservatives while provoking snide dismissals from many in the mainstream press. Will this prove inspiration for a Christian cinematic renaissance? Read More… This year’s Fourth of July moviegoing experience was a surprise. The top draw at the box office was not a feel-good blockbuster but a thriller about child sex trafficking. It’s called Sound of Freedom and stars Jim Caviezel, of...

Who Is a Libertarian?

It’s plicated than you think. A new book takes a detailed look at all the peting definitions, and enormous resources that the libertarian movement brings to discussions of a free market and a free people. Read More… In their new book, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism, Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi have created an exhaustive and fascinating history of the libertarian movement and its animating philosophies. While for many, the term hardly existed...

The “National Apostasy” of John Keble

Perhaps not a name familiar to many, yet 190 years ago today John Keble lit a fire of church renewal that continues to burn, even beyond the parishes of England. Read More… From the 1830s onward, a movement developed in the Church of England that sought to reclaim a classic High Church tradition within Anglicanism that gave weight to the apostolic succession, sacraments, the Christian year and festivals, and liturgical order. Some, though not all, within this group sought to...

What Good Is a Christian Alternative Without Christ?

During his first term, George W. Bush promised that faith-based organizations that fought addiction and poverty would not be muted in their proclamation of the gospel. The heads of those organizations didn’t believe him. Read More… My last entry in this series on passionate conservatism movement concluded with a question: Would John DiIulio, head of the George W. Bush administration’s faith-based office, insist that religion-based programs, to be eligible for federal grants, be devoid of religious teaching or evangelism? I...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

Adam Smith and the Poor

Adam Smith did not seem to think that riches were requisite to happiness: “the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments). But he did not mend beggary. The beggar here is not any beggar, but Diogenes the Cynic, who asked of Alexander the Great only to step back so as not to cast a shadow upon Diogenes as he reclined alongside the highway....

Mar 27, 2026

Lord Jonathan Sacks: The West’s Rabbi

In October 1798, the president of the United States wrote to officers of the Massachusetts militia, acknowledging a limitation of federal rule. “We have no government,” John Adams wrote, “armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, and revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” The nation that Adams had helped to found would require the parts of the body...

Mar 27, 2026

Conversation Starters with … Anne Bradley

Anne Bradley is an Acton affiliate scholar, the vice president of academic affairs at The Fund for American Studies, and professor of economics at The Institute of World Politics. There’s much talk about mon good capitalism” these days, especially from the New Right. Is this long overdue, that a hyper-individualism be beaten back, or is it merely cover for increasing state control of the economy? Let me begin by saying that I hate “capitalism with adjectives” in general. This...

Mar 27, 2026

Jesus and Class Warfare

Plenty of Marxists have turned to the New Testament and the origins of Christianity. Memorable examples include the works of F.D. Maurice and Zhu Weizhi’s Jesus the Proletarian. After criticizing how so many translations of the New Testament soften Jesus’ teachings regarding material possessions, greed, and wealth, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has gone so far to ask, “Are Christians supposed to be Communists?” In the Huffington Post, Dan Arel has even claimed that “Jesus was clearly a Marxist,...

Mar 27, 2026

Creating an Economy of Inclusion

The poor have been the main subject of concern in the whole tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. The Catholic Church talks often about a “preferential option for the poor.” In recent years, many of the Church’s social teaching documents have been particularly focused on the needs of the poorest people in the world’s poorest countries. The first major analysis of this topic could be said to have been in the papal encyclical Populorum Progressio, published in 1967 by Pope...

Mar 27, 2026

C.S. Lewis and the Apocalypse of Gender

From very nearly the beginning, Christianity has wrestled with the question of the body. Heretics from gnostics to docetists devalued physical reality and the body, while orthodox Christianity insisted that the physical world offers us true signs pointing to God. This quarrel persists today, and one form it takes is the general confusion among Christians and non-Christians alike about gender. Is gender an abstracted idea? Is it reducible to biological characteristics? Is it a set of behaviors determined by...

Mar 27, 2026

How Dispensationalism Got Left Behind

Whether we like it or not, Americans, in one way or another, have all been indelibly shaped by dispensationalism. Such is the subtext of Daniel Hummel’s provocative telling of the rise and fall of dispensationalism in America. In a little less than 350 pages, Hummel traces how a relatively insignificant Irishman from the Plymouth Brethren, John Nelson Darby, prompted the proliferation of dispensational theology, especially its eschatology, or theology of the end times, among our ecclesiastical, cultural, and political...

Mar 27, 2026

Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church

Religion & Liberty: Volume 33, Number 4 Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church by Christopher Parr • October 30, 2023 Portrait of Charles Spurgeon by Alexander Melville (1885) Charles Spurgeon was a young, zealous 15-year-old boy when he came to faith in Christ. A letter to his mother at the time captures the enthusiasm of his newfound Christian faith: “Oh, how I wish that I could do something for Christ.” God granted that wish, as Spurgeon would e “the prince of...

Mar 27, 2026

Mistaken About Poverty

Perhaps it is because America is the land of liberty and opportunity that debates about poverty are especially intense in the United States. Americans and would-be Americans have long been told that if they work hard enough and persevere they can achieve their dreams. For many people, the mere existence of poverty—absolute or relative—raises doubts about that promise and the American experiment more generally. Is it true that America suffers more poverty than any other advanced democracy in the...

Mar 27, 2026

Up from the Liberal Founding

During the 20th century, scholars of the American founding generally believed that it was liberal. Specifically, they saw the founding as rooted in the political thought of 17th-century English philosopher John Locke. In addition, they saw Locke as a primarily secular thinker, one who sought to isolate the role of religion from political considerations except when necessary to prop up the various assumptions he made for natural rights. These included a divine creator responsible for a rational world for...

Mar 27, 2026