Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY
/
Editor’s note
Editor’s note
May 8, 2025 1:27 AM

The Spring 2011 issue of Religion & Liberty leads off with an interview with Wayne Grudem, author of the new book Politics According to the Bible. The author is a giant in the evangelical world. He helps all of us to think Biblically and while the book offers a political worldview, ultimately it helps us to focus on the Word made Man. That is exactly what Grudem intends. Politics According to the Bible is a superb resource for believers to think about man's relationship to the state and his Creator. It is also a handy resource for a Christian writer to have on his or her bookshelf. Grudem is the author of another book that many of us at Acton have been edified by since it was first published in 2003, Business for the Glory of God. His solid insight is educational and inspirational, and we are thankful he joined us in conversation about some pressing events and concerns.

R&L's managing editor Ray Nothstine contributes a fine piece covering the tornado relief efforts by Christian ministries in the American South and Midwest. His focus is on telling the stories of a few of the churches and people involved. He also contributes valuable theological insight, touching on the problem of evil and the "suffering servant." Nothstine is grateful to Tuscaloosa resident Jeff Bell and Joplin pastor Randy Gariss. They both generously offered their time for interviews even though they are extremely busy with the recovery.

David Paul Deaval contributes a review of The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order by Daniel J. Mahoney. Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg offers a piece for the issue titled "Debt, Finance, and Catholics." The debt crisis is so prodigious, that Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels aptly referred to the debt as the "new red menace."

We profiled Richard John Neuhaus in this issue for "In the Liberal Tradition." It is said, "In all things, he had the heart of a pastor." He was always gracious and mitted to teaching and edifying God's people. It was not only his mind that made him such a powerful force in the public square but passion and his ability to value personal relationships. We interviewed him for R&L in 1993 about the role of faith in public life. On that issue, perhaps there was no greater voice of his generation.

I should add that Fr. Neuhaus was well known for his influence in the public square and for his insights into the moral foundations of the American experiment. But he should be just as famous for his mand and for books like As I Lay Dying: Meditations Upon Returning.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved