Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Book Reviews

March 27, 2025

The Secular and the Dead

More than a decade ago, I had the privilege of visiting Tuol Sleng, a museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, that displays in horrific detail the murderous brutality committed by the totalitarian Khmer Rouge, which governed the country from 1975 to 1979. Continue Reading...
March 19, 2025

The What Ifs and What Was of American History

Professor Walter A. McDougall’s new book, Gems of American History, is subtitled The Lecturer’s Art, an apt phrase for a collection of lectures delivered to audiences ranging from the Museum of the American Revolution to the Agnes Irwin School. Continue Reading...
August 07, 2024

The Historic Creeds vs. Passing Theological Fads

Evangelical Christians sometimes struggle with how best to enforce “orthodoxy.” The past century of Protestant history could be written as a story of attempts to define what’s essential and what’s debatable on issues from the Bible’s “inerrancy” to more recent controversies over marriage, sexuality, and women’s ordination as pastors. Continue Reading...
August 01, 2024

Children Are Their Future, and Ours

It’s trendy for pundits and politicians to advocate for declining birth rates, but a new book tackles one of the most pressing global crises over the next century: depopulation in industrialized countries. Continue Reading...
July 18, 2024

Cognitive Dissonance at the New York Times

Any rational person will readily agree that life in America has become slightly insane. This was true especially of COVID time and its consequences, be they medical, political, or existential. But even before that, much of America had endured the tyranny of “political correctness”—a term that has gone out of fashion, replaced by “woke” or “wokeism.” Continue Reading...
July 17, 2024

A High and Holy Art for All

These days, the world of contemporary American poetry is less one world than many. Never has so much poetry been published; rarely have there been more “camps” or “contingents” that have little to say to each other. Continue Reading...
July 16, 2024

A CNN Host Does History

Fareed Zakaria acknowledges in Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, that “scholars who detail the way that material conditions and individual freedoms have improved over the centuries are often dismissed as peddlers of ‘Whig history.’” Continue Reading...
June 25, 2024

Pagans, Gnostics, and Christians—Oh My?

Conservatives, conscious of the past, disturbed by the present, and worried about the future, often ask: Where did it all go wrong? The polymathic aristocrat Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn argued that the “genuine historian” would trace our present ills to the French Revolution. Continue Reading...
June 20, 2024

How the Most Influential Novel Ever Written Has Been Misunderstood

“You have no real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston.” —Syme to Smith, Nineteen Eighty-Four For 75 years, the number “1984” has represented a numerical nightmare. Those four digits have been brandished in screaming headlines, blaring soundbites, a BBC teleplay that resulted in heart attacks and even deaths of viewers (in December 1954), and the Washington hotline of the John Birch Society, the far-right American advocacy group. Continue Reading...
June 19, 2024

Should Christians Be Afraid of Christian Nationalism?

Controversy erupted late last month when the New York Times reported that Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito once flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his New Jersey vacation home. The paper alleged it was a symbol “for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.” Continue Reading...