Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Book Reviews

May 11, 2022

The Sowell of black America

“Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.” —Augustine Thomas Sowell is a towering figure in the liberty movement, certainly the most (in)famous “black conservative” of the 20th century. Continue Reading...
May 10, 2022

The Founders’ Constitution and its discontents

The term “constitutional law” is in large part a misnomer. This is rarely discussed within the guild of the legal profession and heretical in the increasingly woke precincts of the legal academy, where the field of “constitutional theory” is a cottage industry. Continue Reading...
May 03, 2022

Hollywood’s craven surrender to the Chinese Communist government

Who’s in charge in Hollywood? Surely studio bosses, well-compensated executives, A-list actors, and celebrated writers and directors set the agenda in the American entertainment industry, don’t they? Not so fast, says Wall Street Jour­­nal reporter Erich Schwartzel in a rigorously researched, admirably hard-hitting new book that looks at the pernicious influence of China on Hollywood. Continue Reading...
March 01, 2022

Does anyone care who John Galt is anymore?

If it had not been for the railroads, I would never have gotten beyond the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged. Having had a vague idea of what Ayn Rand believed in, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the story depended so heavily on the Iron Horse (given that most “libertarians” view trains as collectivist and bad and cars as admirable chariots of liberty). Continue Reading...
December 06, 2021

Religion in the public square strengthens public discourse

Religious expression in the public square is currently challenged by two competing concerns. On the left, some worry that religion is an anti-rational monolith, quietly subverting legitimate expressions of democracy. Others, on the right, worry that religious diversity destroys cultural cohesion, which they see as necessary to democracy. Continue Reading...
March 12, 2020

Why culture matters for the economy

This article first appeared on February 24, 2020, in Law & Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund, Inc., and was republished with permission.   In many peoples’ minds, economics and economists remain locked in a world of homo economicus—the ultimate pleasure-calculator who seeks only to maximize personal satisfaction from the consumption of goods and services and whose occasional displays of seemingly altruistic behavior really only function as a means of self-satisfaction. Continue Reading...