Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Christian Social Thought

May 16, 2018

How property rights originated from Christian theology

Property rights originated from Christian theology, and have proven themselves empirically over the past couple hundred years, says economist Eric Falkenstein. “The liberal ideas that gave rise to the Enlightenment are generally thought (eg, Steven Pinker) to be a break from a religious thinking,” adds Falkenstein. Continue Reading...
May 09, 2018

How Kuyper can bring evangelicals and Catholics together

Have Catholics sacrificed the integrity of their faith tradition by allying with conservative evangelicals (like me)? Matthew Walther, a national correspondent at The Week, thinks so. Walther claims the alliance between Catholics and evangelical Protestants was born of supposedly shared values. Continue Reading...
May 07, 2018

Bernie Sanders, jobs, and what work really is

Last month the Washington Post reported, “Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will announce a plan for the federal government to guarantee a job paying $15 an hour and health-care benefits to every American worker “who wants or needs one,”…” These jobs would be the product of hundreds of government projects initiated in, “…infrastructure, care giving, the environment, education and other goals.” Continue Reading...
May 02, 2018

Letter from Rome: Alfie’s political lessons

Readers in Italy, the UK and the US are probably already familiar with the case of Alfie Evans, the 23-month-old baby boy suffering from an undiagnosed degenerative neurological condition. I’m writing on April 30, two days after Alfie died and one week after he was taken off life support at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool, where he had been a patient since December 2016. Continue Reading...
April 24, 2018

How not to think clearly on faith and economics

Mark Labberton, President of Fuller Seminary, recently addressed a meeting of Evangelical leaders held at Wheaton College and has released a reconstruction of his remarks. It is an interesting address which spends four paragraphs explicitly addressing questions of economics and economic policy. Continue Reading...
April 18, 2018

A polite rebuke of Pope Francis’ economic confusion

Review of Pope Francis and the Caring Society, edited by Robert M. Whaples; The Independent Institute, Oakland, CA; 2017, 234 pp. Having toiled in the free-market research universe for nearly two decades, perhaps the most common misperception I’ve encountered is “whataboutism.” Continue Reading...
April 18, 2018

Is economics an ideology?

Richard H. Spady, research professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins, has recently published a piece at First Things entitled ‘Economics as Ideology’ in which he explores some contemporary trends among economists and their use of economics as a Procrustean bed to reshape society in its own image, A body of thought is “ideological” when it will­fully projects its own first principles on its subject matter and actively seeks, perhaps unconsciously, material changes to bring social realities into conformity with these first principles. Continue Reading...
March 22, 2018

The bishop, Balaam, and communism

Lester DeKoster begins his book Communism and Christian Faith, now out in a new edition from Christian’s Library Press, with a quote from Bishop Joseph Butler’s sermon ‘Upon the Character of Balaam’: “Things and actions are what they are, and their consequences will be what they will be: why then should we seek to be deceived?” Continue Reading...