RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
What can we expect from Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson?
Potential appointments to the Supreme Court have taken on an outsized role in determining the fitness of presidential candidates in recent years. The scrutiny potential justices undergo has also e part inquisition, part circus. Nevertheless, their politics matter. Blame Marbury v. Madison. Read More… There is almost no institution in the past 100 years that has more profoundly shaped American public life than the Supreme Court. As a result, position of the Supreme Court has e one of the most...
Who’s writing Vladimir Putin’s Animal Farm?
The history of Russia in Ukraine is an old and terrible one. The 2019 film Mr. Jones tells the story of the Holodomor: “death by hunger.” Why would Stalin starve millions in a man-made famine? Why else? He needed the money. Read More… It’s 1934 and Gareth Jones (James Norton), journalist and foreign adviser to British prime minister Lloyd George, is trying to convince a room full of stuffed shirts with fancy government titles that Adolf Hitler is looking to...
“Make it art first”: The freedom of the artist in cancel culture
A new book argues that the artist must be free from “relevance” while also adhering to some kind of authority. The question is, Whose authority? Read More… Among the rarest qualities of the late American filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, who died in January at age 82, was his conviction, repeatedly stated and consistently in evidence in his work, that the art of film had its own set of rules and precedents. Close-ups, camera movements, and cuts weren’t meant to be used...
The Irish writer as chronicler of the human condition
On this St. Patrick’s Day, pick up a copy of O’Neill, Synge, or Joyce and retreat to a self-contained world marked by human self-deception and tragic loss, and maybe a laugh or two. Read More… We may live in benighted times, but consider the world of just over a hundred years ago. Recurrent cultural or political shock, and often premature or violent death, was quite familiar to the generation emerging in the early years of the 20th century. It sometimes...
A Dark Knight of the soul
The Batman is more than just another reboot of the now-all-too-familiar tale of crime and punishment. The film asks deep questions that linger long after you leave the theater. Read More… The Batman plunges us straight into the middle of a crisis of faith. Gone is Bale’s confident and charismatic playboy. Robert Pattinson’s Batman hasn’t slept for a week. He journals, sulks, and obsesses over details. A Goth in Gotham—a concept that sounds like it shouldn’t work, but does. The...
RELIGION & LIBERTY
Deeds not words: The good works reader
In a time of blockbuster television specials about the discovery of “lost” gospels, Jesus seminars, and a steady stream of theological fads designed to make celebrities out of seminary professors, the thought piling a collection of patristic writings on the practice of good works seems slightly out of the mainstream, if not countercultural. But that is exactly what Thomas C. Oden has done with The Good Works Reader, a book that succeeds as an introduction, a guide, and a...
Apr 29, 2026
William F. Buckley
“The best defense against surpatory government is an assertive citizenry.” William F. Buckley, Jr., grew up in an era that was embracing the ascendancy of government expansion under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Buckley’s heroic battle against modern liberalism was so pronounced and effective because of the seriousness of his ideas and the intellectual weight they carried. His 1951 book God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom, which highlighted the efforts of professors to indoctrinate...
Apr 29, 2026
Ethics and the job market
The job market e under pressure of late as the economic shake-up continues. We are reminded that the world of the past, in which workers held one job their entire lives and slowly ascended the corporate ladder until retiring plete security, no longer exists. This is probably a good thing to the extent that it represents a new economic vibrancy. In the world of economics, another name plete security is economic stagnation. Still, changing jobs can introduce great challenges...
Apr 29, 2026
The Pope on "Love in Truth"
In his much anticipated third encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (Love in Truth), Pope Benedict XVI does not focus on specific systems of economics—he is not attempting to shore up anyone’s political agenda. He is rather concerned with morality and the theological foundation of culture. The context is, of course, a global economic crisis—a crisis that’s taken place in a moral vacuum, where the love of truth has been abandoned in favor of a crude materialism. The pope urges that...
Apr 29, 2026
Editor's note
This issue of Religion & Liberty offers perhaps a more international perspective than past issues, and that is beneficial since we live in a very globalized society today. We are fortunate to offer an interview with Mustafa Akyol, who spoke at last summer's Acton University. Akyol, a critic of Islamic extremism and Turkish secularism, is also a defender of free markets and the positive role Islam can play in a democratic society with a greater interest in economic freedom....
Apr 29, 2026
Eliot, Kirk and the moral imagination
The following is adapted from a speech on the occasion of the republication of Russell Kirk's Eliot and His Age, given to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute student group at Central Michigan University in September 2008. What makes T. S. Eliot and Russell Kirk so important that we should be here tonight to discuss them? Well, for one, both fathered ages--the twentieth century was, according to Kirk, The Age of Eliot and Kirk himself inaugurated the contem- porary Conservative Age...
Apr 29, 2026
Editor's note
Recent press accounts of atrocities against Christians in the Muslim world too often point to mutual blame between the parties. In this issue, Nina Shea sets the record straight. Nina Shea, whom Christianity Today called “The Daniel of Religious Rights,” mitted her life to fighting for religious and political freedom across the globe. In this interview, Ms. Shea pays tribute to the ten-year anniversary of the demise munism in Eastern Europe, an uprising that started in the fall of...
Apr 29, 2026
Double-edged sword: The power of the Word - Romans 8:38-39
Romans 8:38-39 For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. One of the great truths and victories of Christianity is that it removes for all time the divine-human alienation. In many religions it’s the people who make...
Apr 29, 2026
Why did The Acton Institute develop the 'Effective Stewardship Curriculum'?
One of the best ways to reach people of faith is in their places of worship and munities. Church and lay leaders of many different Christian traditions are often looking for quality and affordable curriculum materials that can equip their own members to act and think biblically about important social issues such as care of creation, poverty relief, financial stewardship, and giving. Acton’s purpose in developing the Effective Stewardship Curriculum and NIV Stewardship Bible was to take the best...
Apr 29, 2026
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