Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Book Reviews

June 03, 2024

Hidden in Kafka’s Castle

Should we blame Max Brod? Brod was almost certainly the nearest thing Franz Kafka ever had to a friend, and in time Kafka appointed him his literary executor. The instructions he gave were unequivocal: all the work that remained unpublished on his death, which came on June 3, 1924, including three novels and a large number of stories, was to be promptly destroyed. Continue Reading...
May 17, 2024

The Single Christian

For Christians in the modern world, one of the aspects of our faith most central to daily life is God’s instruction to Adam and Eve in Genesis that they “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.” Continue Reading...
May 16, 2024

The Smartphone Generation Isn’t All Right

The evidence is almost incontrovertible. Economic growth through free trade, globalization, and burgeoning markets have allowed for unparalleled worldwide wealth. Less than 10% of the world population lives on subsistent wages, and many of the countries still mired in poverty are destitute largely due to human-caused exigencies like war and corruption. Continue Reading...
May 10, 2024

Whose Speech? What Limits?

Depending on your view, free speech in the United States is either beleaguered and endangered or far too expansive, even out of control. Ours is a society that censors books, forbids the honest teaching of unpalatable historical truths, cancels speakers, fires tenured professors for ordinary academic work, and forbids prayers at public school graduation ceremonies. Continue Reading...
May 01, 2024

The Church Is All Right

G.K. Chesterton once said that a stolen umbrella confirmed for him that the Catholic Church was where he belonged. As he explained, when attending different Christian churches, he often left his umbrella at the back door and collected it after the service. Continue Reading...
April 26, 2024

Finding Contentment in the Chaos

In today’s ever-changing world, contentment seems like a forgotten virtue. The pace of our gig economy only seems to be speeding up, as institutions and organizations all struggle to adjust to new realities. Continue Reading...
April 23, 2024

Brady, Jordan, or Hayek: Who’s the Real GOAT?

Trendy title aside, Tyler Cowen’s new book, GOAT: Who Is the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does It Matter?,is a mini masterpiece. Cowen takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the life and works of the greatest economists of all time (Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes, Hayek, J.S. Continue Reading...
April 01, 2024

Get Back to Work if You Know What’s Good for You

David L. Bahnsen’s new book, Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life, proposes a counterintuitive, if not contrarian, thesis. An extremely successful businessman (his firm, The Bahnsen Group, manages over $5 billion in assets) and a bona fide nerd who loves to write about faith, politics, and economics, Bahnsen argues that we’re not overworked—we’re underworked. Continue Reading...
March 27, 2024

The New Culture Warriors

How can principled conservatives reunite a fractured coalition? The ties that once bound the various parties on the right have frayed and, in some cases, snapped. The authors of Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture Wars answer this question and offer a set of approaches and values they claim can form a winning coalition. Continue Reading...