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Whence the rugged individualism that is traditionally synonymous with being American? Was it there from the beginning, rooted in our founding documents? Or does the idea represent a later corruption that can be reversed in pursuit of a more religious or egalitarian republic? Read More… Americans are an individualistic bunch. Our popular culture makes heroes of outsiders, loners, and disrupters. Our politicians emphasize their independence of entrenched institutions, party discipline, and special interests. In economic affairs, we assume that success...

C.S. Lewis: How ‘Medieval’ Was He?

An important new addition to Lewis studies explores the influence of the medievals on Lewis the writer. But Lewis the thinker was just as importantly an anti-modernist modern. Read More… When es to evaluating C.S. Lewis’ engagement with medieval authors, Jason Baxter performs the heavy lifting with ease, almost with wings. The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great prises, in effect, a sequence of primers on major and minor figures—Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, Calcidius, Dante, Nicholas...

Spielberg’s The Fabelmans Captures the Magic and Mystery of Moviegoing

The director of such blockbusters as Jaws and E.T. and the Oscar-winning Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan delivers a thinly veiled autobiographical account of how he came to be a believer in our secular religion. Read More… Modern society has no shortage of candidates for substitute religions. Instead of attending religious services, we can assemble at football games; in lieu of studying the lives of the saints, we e to know Harry and Meghan. And, for much of the...

King Jesus and Political Discipleship

A new book asks us to consider what exactly the Gospel calls us to be and to do as citizens in a fractious, contentious, confusing time. Spoiler alert: It looks a lot like the cross. Read More… Our current political reshuffling has been dizzying, perhaps even more in the munity than among Americans in general. The conservative shift toward populism under Trump empowered both a push for real nationalism—blood, soil, industrial policy—as well as even more fringe movements such as...

Jimmy Lai Trial Adjourned Until September 2023

Lai remains in prison as Hong Kong awaits word regarding Lai’s international legal counsel. Read More… Entrepreneur and freedom fighter Jimmy Lai’s fight for justice will now drag on for nine more months as the Hong Kong High Court adjourns his trial. The es as Hong Kong waits for Beijing to rule on allowing King’s Counsel Tim Owen, a British lawyer and internationalist specialist, to join Lai’s defense team in his fight against the country’s draconian National Security Law. The...

Art as Spiritual Journey

A new book shows how the greatest works of art were more than just opportunities to feel something but pilgrimages to the divine. Read More… In his essay “The Philosophy of Medieval Art,” Bishop Fulton Sheen opens with the statement, “There is no such thing as understanding the art in any period apart from the philosophy of that period.” In other words, far from being a frivolous elective course for aimless liberal arts majors, Sheen explains that the discipline of...

Jimmy Lai Gets 5 Years for Fraud as He Awaits Trial

Hong Kong’s freedom fighter takes another brutal hit from Beijing. Read More… Held in solitary confinement, 75-year-old Jimmy Lai is still awaiting trial for the crime of resisting the iron grip of the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong. On December 10, however, that grip got a little tighter. A Hong Kong court sentenced Lai to an additional five years and nine months on two counts of fraud, related to a leasing issue with his pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily. According...

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...

Aug 12, 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,...

Aug 12, 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...

Aug 12, 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...

Aug 12, 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...

Aug 12, 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....

Aug 12, 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...

Aug 12, 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...

Aug 12, 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...

Aug 12, 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...

Aug 12, 2026