Religion | Religious News - www.mreligion.com

The unity of faith and politics, more or less

The legitimization of so-called same-sex marriage in Spanish law has not surprisingly elicited a strong response from Christians around the world. This particular disagreement is often cast by proponents of change as a matter of Religion trying to encroach on Politics. However, I always flinch when the Church/State dichotomy is used to suggest that we can exist in one of these realms individually and absolutely, as if neither realm influences the other. On this topic, Rocco Buttliglione notes a particular...

The late(st) great G8 debate

From an interview on Zenit.org with Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the president of the Italian division of Santander Central Hispanic Bank and a professor of the Catholic University of Milan, discussing African debt relief: “What should have been done was to put these countries in a condition of being able to pay the debts, even if in 1,000 years, helping them to create the necessary wealth for their own survival, as well as for their own dignity as human beings, who...

‘For God’s Sake, Please Just Stop!’

A fascinating interview with Kenyan economist James Shikwati in the July 4 edition of Der Spiegel: SPIEGEL: Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa… Shikwati: … for God’s sake, please just stop. SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty. Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they...

Summer Olympics in London, 2012

London has been awarded the 2012 Summer Olympics, beating out Paris, New York, Madrid, and Moscow. According to a report, “The victory means that London will play host to the world’s premier sporting event in seven years’ time with a specially-built stadium and village rising from what is now an urban wasteland in the east of the city.” And PM Tony Blair pledged full support for the games, “My promise to you is we will be your very best partners,”...

‘The Warning to Rich Oppressors’

The Acton Institute has announced the honorees for the 2005 Homiletics Award, on the text of James 5:1-6, “The Warning to Rich Oppressors.” In first place ($2,000) is Earl Eckbold, a Master of Divinity student at Lutheran Theological Seminary, Philadelphia. In second ($1,000) is Steven deBoer, a Master of Divinity student at Calvin Theological Seminary. Finishing in third place ($500) is Ken Krause, a Master of Divinity student at Calvin Theological Seminary. Gabe Gilliam, a Master of Divinity and Master...

Get behind me Satan

One of the free downloads offered today in the iTunes music store is an interview with Jack and Meg White of the White Stripes. They were guests of Terry Gross on Fresh Air on June 9, 2005 and spoke about their new album, Get Behind Me Satan. Here’s an exchange between Jack and Terry on religion: TG: …Were you brought up with religion? JW: Oh yes, heavy duty. But not to the point of speaking in tongues or anything, but...

The importance of the Pastoral ministry

In the words of puritan Samuel Hieron, in the care of a bad Miller we loose but our meale, of the Farrier but our horse, of the Taylour but our garment, of the Lawyer but our money, of the Physitian but our bodyes: but in the hands of an vnfaithfull minister a man looseth his soule and his everlasting portion in heaven. –Samuel Hieron, Aarons Bells A-sounding (1623), quoted in J. William Black, Reformation Pastors: Richard Baxter and the Ideal...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Feb 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...

Feb 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,...

Feb 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...

Feb 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...

Feb 27, 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....

Feb 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...

Feb 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...

Feb 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...

Feb 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...

Feb 27, 2026