Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Book Review

August 13, 2024

A Revolution Captured on Canvas

In John Adams’ estimation, the American Revolution began with an argument in a back room in Boston. “Who of your profession will undertake to paint a Debate or an Argument?” the former president asked of the artist John Trumbull in a letter in 1817. Continue Reading...
May 15, 2024

Russell Kirk’s Moral Imagination

The publication of Camilo Peralta’s The Wizard of Mecosta: Russell Kirk, Gothic Fiction, and the Moral Imagination by Vernon Press is an exciting development. Peralta is part of a rising generation of scholars and completed his doctoral work at Faulkner University and spent time at Piety Hill as both a Russell Kirk seminar attendee and a research fellow in the Kirk Center’s Wilbur Fellow program. Continue Reading...
December 20, 2022

C.S. Lewis: How ‘Medieval’ Was He?

When it comes 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 Mind comprises, in effect, a sequence of primers on major and minor figures—Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, Calcidius, Dante, Nicholas of Cusa, Bernard Sylvestris, inter alios—while it traces their imprint on Lewis’ writings. Continue Reading...
C.S. Lewis
December 14, 2022

Art as Spiritual Journey

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.” Continue Reading...
June 10, 2020

Understanding Pinochet

Writing a biography of someone like General Augusto Pinochet is fraught with potential pitfalls. Does it become an exercise in whitewashing someone whose regime oversaw a brutal repression which included the “disappearing” of approximately 2,228 people? Continue Reading...
May 01, 2020

Markets, populism and a fading American dream

The political divisions that started erupting across America in 2015 are about many things. These include the meaning of national sovereignty, the sense of a growing chasm between the political class and everyone else, and angst about what many believe to be unwarranted accelerations in wealth and income inequalities. Continue Reading...
February 21, 2020

Three books to help you think like an economist

Everyone knows that there is a difference between knowing about something and knowing how to do something. The first is a superficial way of knowing, not a bad way to begin, but it is no substitute for the mastery which comes by integrating knowledge into experience. Continue Reading...