Religion | Religious News - www.mreligion.com

The latest in a string of adaptations of the 19th-century Italian children’s bines brilliant artistry with ideological incoherence and absurdity, all in the service of both lionizing and subverting childhood. Read More… Guillermo del Toro’s career is evidence that the Oscars still favor the romance of the left. He has just won the Best Animated Feature award for his Pinocchio, which he set in Fascist Italy. If liberal opinion can treat political opposition as fascism, why shouldn’t del Toro do...

Is Social Science ‘Science’?

A highly praised book that lays bare the presuppositions that inform the “science” of social science invites readers to rethink how they interpret what is popularly considered “real,” not to mention “human.” Read More… Jason Blakely is professor of political science at Pepperdine University and has written a book, We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power, that is likely to perturb some, gratify others, but interest almost everyone. He writes on the many ways in which...

The Chinese Communist Party Wages War on Religion—Again

Upon the death of Chairman Mao, religious believers in China enjoyed a brief relaxation of persecution, and even a measure of liberty. But as Xi Jinping has demanded increased reverence for Chinese socialism, the faithful have begun paying the price again. Yet the young remain a source of hope. Read More… Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping secured a third term last October. He continues to transform what once was loose authoritarian rule into a near-totalitarian system. In...

Antonin Scalia’s Rise to Greatness

The first volume of a biography of the late Supreme Court justice has been published, opening a window into the highly influential—and polarizing—jurist’s life. It’s clear that his opinions were formed not merely in class- and courtrooms but also by the lived experiences of an Italian immigrant’s son. Read More… When Judge Antonin Scalia was confirmed to a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States on September 16, 1986, no senator voted in opposition. He was confirmed by...

50 Years On, Cellphones Have Shown the Way for Inclusive Global Progress

One simple device that virtually no one could afford has now e ubiquitous, and an accelerant of economic and social growth, especially among the world’s poorest. What’s the next best gadget, and how do we get it into the hands of the e people? Read More… Today, April 3, 2023, is the 50th anniversary of mercial introduction of cellphones. On this day in 1973, Martin Cooper of Motorola used a cellphone to place a call from Manhattan to the headquarters...

Dungeons & Dragons and the Death of Honor

Hollywood has a new hit, an adaptation of the role-playing game where the medieval virtues of physical courage, sacrifice, and protection of the weak are turned on their head to make a mockery of the traditional male hero. The question is, in service of what? Read More… The most popular entertainment for boys not yet overtaken by the miserable ideology of our times is the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, a source of friendship and adventure. It became a part...

He Opened Not His Mouth

This Good Friday, take time to consider the role silence played in the Passion of Christ, and the role it should play in our daily call to humility. Read More… If you enter a Catholic church this Good Friday, you will notice the atmosphere of silence and emptiness that hangs over the sanctuary. The tabernacle doors are open, revealing the vacancy within. The altar is bare of any covering or ornament. The figures of saints all stand muffled by dark...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Oct 17, 2024

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...

Oct 17, 2024

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...

Oct 17, 2024

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....

Oct 17, 2024

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,...

Oct 17, 2024

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...

Oct 17, 2024

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...

Oct 17, 2024

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...

Oct 17, 2024

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...

Oct 17, 2024

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...

Oct 17, 2024