Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY
/
Editor's note
Editor's note
Aug 1, 2026 11:44 PM

This issue of Religion & Liberty in many ways personifies Christ in culture. The lead interview is an analysis of the faith at work movement from one of its leaders, David W. Miller. Miller reminds us of how the Church has lagged behind in integrating faith with work, and quite often many pastoral and church leaders have failed in articulating a strong theology of work. As you will see, some of these reasons are ideological, while some may simply arise from practical reasons. At the same time, faith at work has a significant grassroots following that has decisively shaped various sectors of the business and corporate arena.

Joseph M. Knippenberg offers a different analysis of the much discussed findings by the Pew Forum on Religion and & Public Life Òon the American religious landscape.Ó Knippenberg's analysis is far less dour than what has been reported in some nationwide headlines, which has often emphasized a movement towards secularization. Knippenberg is a professor of politics at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia, and is an plished writer, widely sought out in academic and popular publications.

Acton's Ray Nothstine reviews The Scandal of Evangelical Politics by Ronald J. Sider, and gives the author some credit for his evolution to a more balanced political and economic understanding parison to his earlier works like Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. Sider's understanding that limited state power is advantageous to religious and political freedom is significant, given his enormous influence in the evangelical munity, especially among those who often identify with the evangelical left.

Thomas C. Oden is an important theological scholar who has greatly contributed to the interest and study of the early Church. Oden is a leader of "paleo-orthodoxy," which is influencing Protestants to embrace the early Church over more modern biblical scholarship; modern theology is at times overly influenced by contemporary political and cultural agendas. Oden is providing the tools and thoughts to make this possible for many who have little or no exposure to the Church Fathers. Our executive editor John Couretas reviews Oden's Deeds Not Words: The Good Works Reader.

Finally, it's highly appropriate that William F. Buckley is the featured figure for the recurrent "In the Liberal Tradition" this issue. Buckley, who passed away at the end of February, was well known as a prolific leader in the modern conservative movement. Buckley was a faithful Catholic, who wrote an autobiography of his faith titled Nearer, My God. We are honored to highlight his own views about his faith, which meant so much to him.

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
A Botched Look at Social Virtues
Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man, argues that ideological conflicts are over and that the world is converging on democracy-cum-capitalism, with national economies integrated into a global one. However, democracy and capitalism require a healthy civil society, which itself depends on “a people’s habits, customs, and ethics,” which must be “nourished through an increased awareness and respect for culture.” (p. 5) Everyone, Fukuyama maintains, has a deep desire “to have his or her...
Making Men Moral
Robert P. George is a Princeton professor, first Vice President of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, and a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. In this book, he has done an admirable job of combining his fields of philosophy (John Finnis was his mentor), law, and political science to analyze the difficult question of how liberal democracy can enact laws that seek to promote civility and personal goodness while upholding basic individual liberties. Although much of the...
The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832
Large sympathy must inform a reading of The Language of Liberty, for its heterodox reading of the substance of the American Revolution strains against its very helpful survey of the rhetoric of the Revolution. That the American revolutionaries were, in the main, a religious and not a secular people is obvious and beyond cavil, despite the impression conveyed by secular historians of later eras. Clark conveys this suitably and accurately, justifying throughout the book his conclusion that “democracy–in the...
Bargaining With The State
Richard Epstein, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, is intrigued in this book by the ways in which important liberties are threatened by legislative actions designed to distribute various benefits and favors to selected groups of people. As Epstein notes, “The conventional wisdom has it that government is subject to extensive limitation when it regulates and none when it contracts” ( p.312). But, Epstein warns, this simplistic attitude badly ignores the importance of limiting all of government’s...
Double Agent for the Greens?
As the readers of this publication are probably aware, environmental regulation is a hot subject for conservatives right now. In the battle to reduce the size and scope of the federal government, we are seeing the first counterattacks to what has been a two-decade-old regulatory jihad by the federal government. And to assist in the revolt, a slew of conservative books and pamphlets have e available detailing not only the quasi-religious, socialist nature of the Green worldview, but also...
The Futility of Coerced Benevolence
Tibor Machan’s Generosity: Virtue in Civil Society provides a fascinating and thorough treatment of the role of virtue in a society characterized by limited government, freedom of association, and economic liberty. Its thesis, according to Machan, is that “Generosity is a moral virtue that cannot flourish in a welfare state or in any sort mand economy, because to be generous is to voluntarily help others in certain ways. It will flourish in a free society.” Generosity and virtue cannot...
An American in London
This was one of the last books by the late Dr. Russell Kirk, who was perhaps America’s foremost intellectual conservative, an eminent scholar in the social sciences and humane letters, and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. It might be said to be both a defense of the traditional European-American culture so much under attack by intellectuals and activists today, and a summary of the major cultural contributions of Britain to...
Welfare: Separating Fact from the Rhetoric
American political discourse has coarsened in recent years. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than with the issue of poverty. As Mary Jo Bane and David T. Ellwood, both currently serving in the Department of Health and Human Services, put it, “when the topic of es up, dialogue often turns angry and judgmental; the prose es purple.” Yet purple prose almost seems appropriate when dealing with today’s welfare system. It is, as many contend, overly expensive; the multiplicity of...
The Pope's Divisions
The collapse of Communism as a world ideological force occasions not only a thorough reassessment of many of the economic and political presuppositions which were fundamental to the post-World War II world, but also a reevaluation of many of the historical interpretations founded on these same presuppositions and widespread during the same period. In fact, one of the major criticisms of the caste of professional historians and political scientists in the United States is their failure as a group,...
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
Recent years have brought to the fore a drumbeat plaints from evangelical intellectuals bemoaning the ineffectual work of evangelical intellectuals. This theme has been sounded recently by Os Guinness, David Wells, and John Seel, among others, and now Mark Noll weighs in. Noll believes that American evangelicals have made small contribution to the intellectual life of the nation and so have failed not only in their civic duty, but also their religious responsibilities. Christians who take seriously the sovereignty...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved