Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore is one of the Chairmen of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee for Religious Liberty. He recently celebrated what is known as a “Red Mass”, an annual event throughout the church for lawyers, judges, legislators and others in the legal profession, at St. Benedict Catholic Church in Richmond, Va. In his homily, he addressed issues of religious liberty pertinent to Americans today. First, he stressed the link between sound society and morality:...

“Byrdes of on kynde and color flok and flye allwayes together,” wrote William Turner in 1545. If he were with us today, the author might construct an interesting Venn diagram representing the activist birds scheduled to testify tomorrow before the Securities and Exchange Commission. But, rather than briefly overlapping sets of circles, the SEC witnesses for greater corporate prise one giant bubble of activists seeking to circumvent the U.S. Supreme Court Citizens United ruling, including Laura Berry, executive director, the...

In this week’s Acton Commentary, Ryan H. Murphy asks, “Why don’t we bat an eye when extremists hope a pagan god will smite SUV owners?” TV Tropes, a Wikipedia-style website, catalogs many clichés of fiction, including this, which the site calls “Gaia’s Vengeance.” Some variation on this theme can be found in major Hollywood movies like The Happening, The Day After Tomorrow, and Avatar. To take a specific example, Kid Icarus: Uprising, a 2012 Nintendo 3DS video game that has...

There was something wrong with Zhang’s dog. The Chinese man had bought the Pomeranian on a business trip, but after he brought it home he found the animal to be wild and difficult to train. The dog would bite his master, make strange noises, and had a tail that mysteriously continued to grow. And the smell. Even after giving the mutt a daily bath Zhang couldn’t bear the strong stink. When he could take it no longer, Zhang sought help...

Former editor of Poetry magazine Christian Wiman struggles, like many of us, to make sense of suffering and faith. His struggle is poetic: God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made the things that bring him near, made the mind that makes him go. A part of what man knows, apart from what man knows, God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made. In the following interview with Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, Wiman discusses his faith journey, his...

In a recent review ofChristena Cleveland’sDisunity in Christ:Uncovering the Hidden Forces that Keep Us Apart,Paul Louis Metzger wonders, “What leads people to associate with those who are similar, while distancing themselves from diverse others? What causes us to categorize other groups in distorted ways?” I remember reading H. Richard Niebuhr’sThe Social Sources of Denominationalism early in my seminary career, and Niebuhr’s analysis made a very strong impression on my admittedly impressionable sensibilities. It was clear to me then, and still...

Have you heard the good news about global poverty? The number of people living in abject poverty — defined as living on less than $1.25 per day — has been halved since 1990. Steve Davies of LearnLiberty explains how that happened and how in the near future we may be able to eradicate extreme poverty. ...

I live in a fairly small town. It’s probably a lot like the places many of you live: a handful of churches, a grocery store, a pharmacy, a hardware store, small businesses and restaurants plus the schools, public and private. Just by doing a Google search, I came up with nine day cares for children in our area. Yet, Nancy Pelosi thinks this isn’t enough. She wants universal childcare, just like Obama is giving us universal healthcare (and we all...

In 1919 Congress passed the Volstead Act enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting, for almost all purposes, the production, sale, and distribution of alcoholic beverages. There are two erroneous things everybody has learned from Prohibition, says Anthony Esolen: “First, it is wrong to try to legislate morality. Second, you cannot do it, for Prohibition failed.” The real lessons of Prohibition, though, go unheeded: That amendment inserted into the Constitution a law that neither protected fundamental rights nor adjusted the mechanics of...

Today at Ethika Politika, John Medendorp, former editor of Calvin Seminary’sStromata, reviews Jordan Ballor’s Get Your Hands Dirty for my channel Via Vitae. He writes, Although Ballor’s book is very accessible, the reading is by no means “light.” I would call it “engaging heavy reading.” While the concepts are clear and the analogies riveting, Ballor has a way of putting so much into a sentence that it can take some time to work through his ideas. I found myself time...