Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Book Reviews

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...
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...
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