Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Book Review

March 07, 2018

Samuel Gregg on contradictions in the papacy

Journalist and Harvard alumnus Philip F. Lawler is no stranger to spotting inconsistencies in the Catholic Church. After the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse crisis unveiled in 2002, Lawler released his highly researched book, The Faithful Departed, tracing the Church’s history of corruption while maintaining an “attention to facts” and a “calm tone.” Continue Reading...
February 14, 2018

Entrepreneurship by example

Of all the schools founded by Robert Luddy, author of the new book Entrepreneurial Life: The Path from Startup to Market Leader, not one of them has a cafeteria. The schools have gyms and Apple TVs, but none of the facilities needed to provide lunches each day. Continue Reading...
January 04, 2018

Abraham Kuyper confronts stereotypes in ‘On Islam’

Abraham Kuyper, who served as prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905, was also a journalist and theologian. Kuyper wrote expansively on public theology in an effort to engage culture through the lens of a Christian worldview, covering topics such as common grace, the kingship of Christ, and the roles of the church and family. Continue Reading...
October 25, 2017

Jerry Pournelle, Russell Kirk Conservative: RIP

Jerry Pournelle passed away in early September and is memorialized in this week’s “Upstream” segment of the Radio Free Acton podcast. An accomplished man in many fields in both the public and private sectors, he perhaps is best known as the author and co-author of a shelf-full of science-fiction novels. Continue Reading...
September 20, 2017

Czeslaw Milosz: Poet Laureate of Freedom

[A review of Milosz: A Biography by Andrzej Franasszek, edited and translated by Aleksandra and Michael Parker, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge University, 2017, 526 pp., $35] “What is poetry which does not save/Nations or people?” Continue Reading...
July 13, 2017

Lenin’s Trip to Infamy

One hundred years ago, the man Winston Churchill dubbed a “plague bacillus” journeyed back from his exile in Europe to eventually seize the reins of power in his native Russia. Vladimir Lenin’s itinerary could not have been more fraught with peril and subterfuge, which makes it an ideal framing story for a recap of the rise of 20th century totalitarianism. Continue Reading...
June 19, 2017

Liberalism in all things except liberalism

Samuel Gregg, director of research at the Acton Institute, recently published a review of Maurice Cowling’s 1963 book Mill and Liberalism, in which Cowling warns of the tendency towards “moral totalitarianism” in John Stuart Mill’s “religion of liberalism.”  Continue Reading...
June 09, 2017

What did Alexis de Tocqueville actually think?

Samuel Gregg, research director at the Acton Institute, recently published a review on the new translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath in which Tocqueville, the “quintessential man of theory,” gets dirty about the politics of the French Revolution. Continue Reading...