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Thomas Sowell is a hero to many Christian conservatives for his frank, well-researched, and contrarian studies of the socio-economic conditions of black Americans. But how many of those Christians know that Sowell is an atheist? Does it matter? Perhaps more than you’d think. Read More… “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.” —Augustine Thomas Sowell is a towering...

The Founders’ Constitution and its discontents

Adrian Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism represents his version of the left’s “living Constitution.” Few people will embrace his self-serving theory, which is tailor-made to modate both his beloved administrative state and integralist moral philosophy—a bination. Read More… The term “constitutional law” is in large part a misnomer. This is rarely discussed within the guild of the legal profession and heretical in the increasingly woke precincts of the legal academy, where the field of “constitutional theory” is a cottage industry. The...

Michael Bay’s Ambulance is DOA

The action and thrills-a-minute director of such blockbusters as Bad Boys, The Rock, and Armageddon abandons his dedication to the heroic, albeit violent, protagonist and succumbs to a popular moralism that makes his latest all too predictable. Read More… Film critics recently have been trying to encourage their audiences to return to theaters—cinema, after all, is a lot more impressive on a big screen and in pany of people who share our emotions. We want to laugh together and to...

Former Apple Daily executive given immunity to testify against Jimmy Lai

This is the latest development in the ing trial of Jimmy Lai, who faces multiple charges under Hong Kong’s so-called National Security Law. Read More… A former associate of Jimmy Lai’s will testify against him in exchange for his freedom, according to Hong Kong Free Press. Lai, a 74-year-old Hong Kong media mogul who owned Next Media and the pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, faces two counts of conspiracy mit collusion with foreign countries or external elements, one count of collusion...

Jimmy Lai receives Catholic University honorary degree while imprisoned

The honorary degree from Catholic University of America, es while Jimmy Lai sits in a Hong Kong prison awaiting a third trial on charges under the city’s so-called National Security Law, was accepted by Lai’s son Sebastien Lai. Read More… The Catholic University of America has honored Jimmy Lai, media mogul and pro-democracy advocate from Hong Kong, with an honorary degree while he is jailed for alleged violations of the National Security Law. Students and faculty at The Catholic University...

HBO’s Tokyo Vice thinks Japan is really just the worst of America

Will the woke police rate this series as a racist example of “white saviour” syndrome? At least the Japanese stars manage to shine in this boring and self-indulgent liberal fantasy. Read More… One of the most stylish of American directors, Michael Mann, who made Heat and The Insider (earning three Oscar nominations), is now producing the HBO series Tokyo Vice and has directed its disappointing first episode. I watched Tokyo Vice hoping Mann could make something of our unwatchable TV,...

Cardinal Joseph Zen arrested in Hong Kong for support of pro-democracy protests released on bail

Along with the currently imprisoned Jimmy Lai, Cardinal Zen as been one of the leading voices for freedom and democracy in Hong Kong. Read More… Following his arrest and hours of questioning, Cardinal Joseph Zen—one of the leading Catholic prelates in Hong Kong—was released on bail after being accused of “collusion with foreign forces.” As a staunch supporter of democracy in Hong Kong and mainland China, Zen has long spoken out against authoritarianism and the persecution of Catholics under Chinese...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Nov 3, 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...

Nov 3, 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...

Nov 3, 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...

Nov 3, 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...

Nov 3, 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...

Nov 3, 2026

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....

Nov 3, 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...

Nov 3, 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...

Nov 3, 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,...

Nov 3, 2026