Religion | Religious News - www.mreligion.com

A Quaker economist’s lesson on seeking the truth together

There are several things, universally known, which one is never supposed to discuss over dinner: religion, politics, and money. I violate this generally well regarded rule on a regular basis while never impeding my digestion. My secret? I try, in the words of the prayer of St. Francis, not to seek so much to be understood as to understand. During the course of the discussion there es a time when my interest and inquiry is reciprocated. I try and focus...

Magic cards and market forces

Back in the 1990s, the debut of Magic: The Gathering marked a new form of gaming: collectible card games. While many may remember it similarly to Pogs, for example, Magic survived where Pogs did not. In fact, Magic is more popular now than ever. In 2018, I co-wrote and presented a paper on the topic for the Association of Private Enterprise Education that detailed its popularity: Magic: The Gathering … is played by millions of people around the world, with...

Why has the West’s integration of reason and faith fallen apart? An interview with Samuel Gregg

Pathologies of reason and faith have greatly affected history. Pathologies of reason are defined by an abandonment of God in search of truth, resulting in a prioritization of empirical data and the natural sciences to gain knowledge. Likewise, pathologies of faith are characterized by an abandonment of reason, or Logos, resulting in sentimental humanitarianism, seen even the spread of moral therapeutic deism currently present in the Church. “In the end, these pathologies proceed from mistaken conceptions of God,” says Samuel...

The UK porn ban

In the United Kingdom, the government has taken many steps to ensure the protection of children from pornography and other adult material; most recently an Age Verification law was scheduled to be legislated on July 15 but has again been pushed back. Its opposition has legitimate reasons for concern; however, if we agree that children need to be shielded from pornographic material, we need to look at how those laws can be appropriately implemented. The timeline of the United Kingdom...

Letter from China: Civic virtue without freedom?

I spent most of July traveling to various parts of the People’s Republic of China. Although I made brief trips to Hong Kong in 2000 and Beijing in 2016, I have never experienced anything remotely similar to this more extended stay. Having a Chinese-speaking guide and the opportunity to speak to “friendly” locals (none of whom can be named out of concerns for their safety) provided more perspective than a tourist would normally have. It would be foolish for an...

Milton Friedman on business as an enemy of enterprise

Milton Friedman is one half of the duo so often identified with “neoliberalism” (the other being Friedrich Hayek), the hegemonic power that is typically seen as constitutive of our contemporary age. Friedman was a brilliant thinker, and one whose ideas warrant attention, not least because of their association with today’s political and economic situation. Oftentimes neoliberalism is connected with an ideology of privatization, which is itself seen as policy intended to empower and prioritize the interests of business and industry....

WSJ profiles the Acton Institute, the antidote to ‘woke’ capitalism?

The Acton Institute reached an international audience of influencers this weekend with its mission of uniting markets with morality. The Wall Street Journalpublished a profile of Acton, and an extended look at the ministry of Acton co-founder Fr. Robert Sirico, in its “Weekend Interview” feature on Saturday, August 3. “When the Market Meets Morality” by William McGurn introduced a critical group of thought leaders to Acton’s work of promoting a free and virtuous society. McGurn writes that, like Lord Acton,...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

The Flawed Greatness of Thomas Jefferson

It is always hard to know where to begin with Thomas Jefferson—or where to end. In that respect, he is not that different from a great many other talented political figures in our history. The politician’s art all but requires a talent for enigma, an ability to draw in disparate followers and factions while remaining mysterious, un-pin-down-able, containing worlds of seeming contradiction within both public image and private life. Think of the tangled plexity of men like Woodrow Wilson,...

Mar 12, 2026

The Cult of Celebrity in the Church of Christ

In a profile for The Guardian from 2012, Kim Kardashian was perplexed. “When I hear people say [what are you famous for], I want to say, ‘what are you talking about?’… I have a hit TV show. We’ve shot more episodes than I Love Lucy!” In the wake of multiple scandals that have rocked the evangelical world, from Mars Hill to Hillsong, the role of the celebrity pastor e in for intense scrutiny. Why be faithful when you can...

Mar 12, 2026

In the Liberal Tradition: Francisco de Vitoria

Francisco de Vitoria probably isn’t a name that rolls off the lips or even vaguely registers in the minds of most, but he is worth knowing. This highly influential 16th-century Spanish Dominican priest is known as no less than the “father of international law.” What does a late Renaissance Catholic priest have to do with the “liberal tradition”? When you’re also the founder of the “School of Salamanca,” more than you think. Born in Burgos, Spain, in 1483, Vitoria...

Mar 12, 2026

Plato’s "Republic" and Our Own

The expectations of justice reside deeply within us. Figures in both the Hebraic and Hellenic worlds placed the demand for a just society at the center of their work. Those demands have echoed through the ages and into our streets. At the earliest of ages plain about things we deem unfair and dog our parents over broken promises. Of all the virtues, justice seems most ingrained. And yet it is the one most likely to create havoc and wreak...

Mar 12, 2026

The Existential Threat of Anti-Christian Nationalism

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic—well beyond the initial two weeks to flatten the curve, but in August of 2020—the New York Times reported, in an article entitled “Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be,” on scientists’ worries about the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. The means by which public health workers and government officials (not to mention journalists) were assessing the spread of the virus was, some feared, too sensitive. People were testing positive...

Mar 12, 2026

The Black Church: A World Within a World

What we mean when we use the word “Black” (and whether or not we capitalize it) causes constant confusion in American life. We are liable to contrast Black with white, and to treat the two terms as though they belong to the same category: race. But this is a mistake. As a matter of historical fact, Black Americans formed separate cultural institutions because they were excluded from white institutions or forced to be subordinate within them on account of...

Mar 12, 2026

Christian Pluralism as a Way of Loving

The evangelical Anglican theologian Michael F. Bird provides a clear-eyed and charitable vision of the current state of religious liberty in the Western world. Working from Australia, but with a keen eye on developments elsewhere and particularly in America, Bird’s offering provides both a framework for evaluating the contemporary situation as well as a call for Christians to promote the need for religious liberty more responsibly. Bird’s book is a helpful point of departure for engaging the challenges and...

Mar 12, 2026

Heroes and Monsters: British Abolition and the Art of Compromise

It may be the most decisive plete victory in any moral argument in human history. European and North American elites had, for centuries, deliberately ignored the ethics of the Atlantic slave trade, or justified it as a regrettable necessity, or simply accepted it as a vast fact of life that could not be wished away. Suddenly, in the 1780s, a previously eccentric and extreme view—that the trade ought to be abolished—won a mass following in both Britain and the...

Mar 12, 2026

The Evolving Religion of Journalism

With the 2016 presidential election looming, the New York Times published a journalism manifesto that was disguised as a mere mentary. If coverage by “mainstream” media of religion, values, culture, and education seem hostile to the beliefs of many Americans, there’s a reason for that. There’s been a paradigm shift in how journalism is done, and for whom. The candidate’s name was in the headline, but the implications of the August 7, 2016, essay “Trump Is Testing the Norms...

Mar 12, 2026

Antigone: A Hero for Our Time

Sophocles’ Antigone is a Rorschach test. People see in it whatever they are thinking. To the self-professed and much munist philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Antigone is a “bitch,” though she may also be an admirable figure in her zealous and determined striving against her government. Or perhaps, Žižek suggests alternately, she is a troublemaker creating havoc within an otherwise healthy, well-organized state. In recent versions of the play that he has published with differing endings, Žižek has put forward both...

Mar 12, 2026