Religion | Religious News - www.mreligion.com

Christian leaders sign petition asking for amnesty for Jimmy Lai and his co-defendants

The petition asks Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam to pardon pro-democracy publisher and entrepreneur Lai and others and to correct the “terrible injustice” that has been inflicted on them through the implementation of the Beijing-inspired National Security Law. Read More… A worldwide coalition of Christian leaders submitted a petition to Carrie Lam, chief executive of Hong Kong, asking her to grant amnesty to individuals charged under the city’s repressive National Security Law (NSL), including one of the city’s most...

What message does NBC’s Olympics coverage send?

The network admits that diplomacy will not dissuade the CCP mitting atrocities against its people—but why assist in promoting a veneer of normalcy? Read More… The media world is not a principled one, and its decisions are often not moral in nature. Standards of coverage are rarely dictated by the metric of right versus wrong but by popular versus unpopular—determined more by what’s likely to attract viewership than what certain subsets of the viewing public may deem the right thing...

House of Gucci is Ridley Scott’s “Basta!” to the commercialization of art

Starring Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, and Al Pacino, this mockery of elites as little more than decadent mafiosi may grab some Oscar nods, but The Godfather it isn’t. Read More… My first Oscars essay presented Wes Anderson, the Hollywood dandy’s Francophilia, The French Dispatch, and gentle criticism of liberal intellectual pretense. The 2022 Oscar contenders also include an examination of American Italophilia—veteran Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, as full of today’s stars as Anderson’s movies are of yesteryear’s. Lady Gaga...

Ilya Shapiro’s ill-worded tweet and the crying game

When a Georgetown law mented on the relative merits of a potential SCOTUS pick, all hell broke loose. Black students demanded a form of “reparations” in response, including a room to “cry.” Have we reached peak “white guilt” yet? Read More… Ilya Shapiro, a Russian émigré, a serious scholar of the American Constitution, and formerly of the libertarian Cato Institute until he was scheduled on February 1 to begin running Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution, has found himself in a...

The Scottish play comes alive in imaginative new Joel Coen film

If you think you’ve seen it all before, perhaps many times before, think again. Expressive direction and Denzel Washington make this a Macbeth for a new era. Read More… Who needs another version of Macbeth on film? You may find yourself asking this question with the release of director Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, which stars Denzel Washington in the title role and, in the part of Lady Macbeth, Coen’s seemingly ubiquitous wife, three-time Academy Award winner Frances McDormand....

Reply to The New York Times: Online worship is still worship

A Lutheran pastor takes issue with a recent Times essay declaring that online religious services should end. But what does it mean to be church? And what does it mean to worship the God es to us wherever we are? Read More… I love watching men’s college basketball. Three e to mind that I’m so thankful to have seen on TV—Chris Jenkins’ buzzer beater to lift Villanova over North Carolina in 2016, Christian Laettner’s dagger to catapult Duke past Kentucky...

Saving men requires the leadership of laymen

Attempts to “save men” in the past, both for the church and from themselves, have often made things worse by making men more passive. It’s time for men in the pews to take control of their own healing. Read More… Progressives are finally waking up to the reality that men and boys are struggling in America. On January 27, Andrew Yang posted a Twitter thread observing that “there’s a crisis among American boys and men that is too often ignored...

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...

Jul 11, 2026

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...

Jul 11, 2026

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...

Jul 11, 2026

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...

Jul 11, 2026

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...

Jul 11, 2026

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...

Jul 11, 2026

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,...

Jul 11, 2026

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...

Jul 11, 2026

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...

Jul 11, 2026

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....

Jul 11, 2026