Religion | Religious News - www.mreligion.com

A new Freedom House report on Free, Partly Free, and Not Free countries is out, and liberty appears to be on the decline. Yet there is still hope that 2023 can turn out to be a turning point toward greater liberty and democracy, one country at a time. Read More… For those of us old enough to have grown up during the Cold War, 1989 stood out as the era’s transformational miracle year. Hungary recognized the 1956 revolutionaries and opened...

Spreading the Flame: The Pioneering Ministry of William Grimshaw

The 18th-century evangelical revival is believed to have saved England from a revolution akin to France’s. Among the lesser-known names who brought gospel hope to classes alienated from the church was a man whose tenacity at saving souls made almost as many enemies as friends. Read More… We have discussed so far the nature of the 18th-century evangelical revival in Britain through the eyes of the most well-known names, John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield. From the 1740s munities...

Jimmy Lai Appeals National Security Committee Decision—Again

Lai’s legal team is arguing that mittee’s decision, which directly affects his personal freedoms and the rights of Hong Kong citizens, should be subject to judicial review. Read More… Jimmy Lai, the imprisoned Hong Kong media mogul and pro-democracy activist, has lodged an appeal after his previous attempt to challenge a decision made by the National Security Committee was rejected, according to the Hong Kong Free Press. The high-profile entrepreneur and former Apple Daily publisher is seeking to overturn mittee’s...

Are High School Debates Rigged Against Conservative Teens?

Should conservative and Christian high school students continue to debate on the national level even if the judges are biased against them? Yes. Read More… I keep rereading James Fishback’s essay on high school debate. Published May 25 in the Free Press, he called out the national circuit of high school debate for being partisan, polarized, and punitive toward any students with sane, moderate, or conservative arguments. In a way, he’s right. I’ve coached students at the Durham Academy Cavalier...

A Campus Satire for Our Time

Lee Oser takes on woke witch-hunts, corporate corruption, DEI checkpoints, and HR mandates in a novel that will have you both laughing and asking which headlines these plot points were cribbed from. Read More… As far back as the 1960s, novelist Philip Roth declared that reality in the United States was outpacing the creative capacities of the writer of fiction. “The actuality is continually outdoing our talents,” he wrote back then, “and the culture tosses up figures daily that are...

A Culinary Introduction to the Devout Life

Want to be more disciplined in your spiritual life? Chow down with the saints. Taste and see that it is good. Read More… es a time when you yearn to live out your faith more deeply. This can mean different things for different believers, but it usually entails taking up a variety of personal disciplines, returning to tradition, mitting oneself to prayer and introspection. For harried souls making our way in a hectic, secularized world, an idealized spiritual life is...

Is Christianity Special?

A new book seeks to counter the trend in academia and pop literature to depict American history as a relentless trampling of human rights by an intolerant Christianity. But does the counteroffensive prove America’s essentially Christian—and liberal in the best sense—character? Read More… Mark David Hall’s Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans defends the role of Christianity in American history against critics who either deny its influence or assert that...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Sep 1, 2025

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,...

Sep 1, 2025

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...

Sep 1, 2025

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...

Sep 1, 2025

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...

Sep 1, 2025

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...

Sep 1, 2025

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...

Sep 1, 2025

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....

Sep 1, 2025

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...

Sep 1, 2025

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...

Sep 1, 2025