Religion | Religious News - www.mreligion.com

In a FoxNews article, Jack Spencer of the Heritage Foundation reveals some interesting finds from their year-long study of the military industry: US Defense relies heavily on a global free market for its equipment. This may seem to fly in the face of the idea that if anyone ought to buy American, it is the American government. But as Spencer points out Congress has tried repeatedly over the years to steer defense contracts in directions that would supposedly shore up...

Benedict and World Youth Day: Becoming adults in Christ

Pope Benedict’s highly publicized trip to Germany for this week’s World Youth Day stands as an opportunity for the event to, in the words of Kishore Jayabalan, engage “serious theological and intellectual work.” The pope’s ing means, “If there is a place to show how the Christian faith shaped Europe and formed heroic persons even in its darkest hours, this is it.” Read the full text of mentary. ...

Water is thicker than blood

In the current edition of The Weekly Messenger (no longer active), John H. Armstrong examines the role of pastor in the Protestant church. In “Getting the Role of Pastor Right Again,” he writes, For a long time I have had serious doubts about many of the models of pastoral ministry used and promoted in the West. These models range from academic and biblical teacher models to chief counselor and care-giver. In my estimation they all fail the biblical test at...

If at first you don’t succeed…

…You might be a Member of Congress: Members of Congress want to establish a new government-backed venture capital program… OK, but what’s the catch? …to replace one that’s being phased out because of sizable losses. I wonder if they’ve considered whether the Government should even be involved in the venture capital business in the first place? Hat Tip: Don Luskin ...

Bandaging the victims

Zimbabwe churches form body to help demolition victims Harare (ENI). Church groups in Zimbabwe have formed a coalition to help victims of a clean-up drive that left hundreds of thousands homeless and drew condemnation from the United Nations and international aid organizations. “Churches have formed a broad-based ecumenical body in the aftermath of the clean-up operation,” the Rev. Charles Muchechetere of the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe told Ecumenical News International. The prises EFZ the Zimbabwe Council of Churches and the...

Ecumenical leader murdered

Brother Roger, founder of the ecumenical munity, Taize, was murdered yesterday while praying. Details here. Brother Roger founded Taize in 1940. ...

Sweet editorial irony and eco-nostalgia

Oh, your lion eyes…Check out the two articles from this week’s journal Nature as reported on . (There must be an editor at work here with a sarcastic sense of humor.) In the first article, mentary by Josh Donlan, a plan is proposed for fighting the loss of endangered species: repopulate the American Plains with (among other things) elephants, wild horses, cheetahs, and yes, lions. The “rewilding” of parts of North America’s heartland could restore some balance to an ecosystem...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Nov 3, 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...

Nov 3, 2026

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...

Nov 3, 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,...

Nov 3, 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....

Nov 3, 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...

Nov 3, 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...

Nov 3, 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...

Nov 3, 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...

Nov 3, 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...

Nov 3, 2026