Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Book Reviews

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...
June 13, 2024

Liz Truss: A Short but Vital Tenure

Liz Truss’ tenure as the United Kingdom’s prime minister will almost certainly be reduced to two footnotes. First, she was invited to form a government by Queen Elizabeth II during Her Late Majesty’s last public engagement. Continue Reading...
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 The instructions he gave were unequivocal: all the work that remained unpublished on his death, which came on June 3, 1924, including three novels and a large number of stories, was to be promptly destroyed.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...