Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Book Review

March 12, 2025

Ross Douthat Wants You to Believe

In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Ross Douthat relates a story from a couple of decades ago, in which he had a late-night conversation with the famously combative atheist Christopher Hitchens. Continue Reading...
March 11, 2025

Are You Free?

The early Protestant Reformers famously disbelieved in the freedom of the will. And yet they gave us a legacy of freedom. This paradox is at the heart of Brad Littlejohn’s Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. Continue Reading...
November 26, 2024

Christianity Against Power-Worship

All modern politics is a clash of totalizing ideologies seeking absolute power. Or at least it seems that way. Christians sometimes find themselves caught in the middle of these culture wars, stuck trying to find compromises between competing goods. Continue Reading...
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...