Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Christian Social Thought

May 08, 2013

‘A Church That Walks Serene’

“Let us not forget: we are a pilgrim church, subject to misunderstanding, to persecution, but a church that walks serene, because it bears the force of love.” ― Oscar A. Romero, The Violence of Love It is no secret to Christians that being one is not easy. Continue Reading...
May 08, 2013

The Injustice of US Educational Attainment

As commencement ceremonies once again are being celebrated around the country, I was reminded again of the moral crisis of US education. Elise Hilton recently surveyed the dismal employment rate among young adults in the US, writing that we have moved in twelve years from having the best rate in the developed world to being among the worst, following the path of Greece, Spain, and Portugal. Continue Reading...
April 29, 2013

Shock Value vs. Moral Courage

Salman Rushdie, the British Indian novelist, has a piece in The New York Times entitled “Wither Moral Courage?” He is saddened that we have “no Gandhis, no Lincolns anymore” and that those who do stand up to the “abuses of power and dogma” are quickly imprisoned or vilified. Continue Reading...
April 26, 2013

Is Higher Education a Sinking Ship?

A recent CNBC article by Mark Koba notes the bleak outlook for 2013 college grads looking for work: A survey released last week from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) reported that businesses plan to hire only 2.1 percent more college graduates from the class of 2013 than they did from the class of 2012. Continue Reading...
April 23, 2013

ICCR Shareholders vs. World Hunger

Finding solutions for feeding the world’s poorest is about as non-controversial a mission as you could imagine for someone pursuing a religious vocation. Yet, the investors belonging to the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility put politicized science ahead of that mission in their opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Continue Reading...
April 22, 2013

Christian Scholarship and the Crisis of the University

This past weekend, I had the privilege to attend and present a paper at the 2013 Kuyper Center for Public Theology conference at Princeton Seminary. The conference was on the subject of “Church and Academy” and focused not only on the relationship between the institutions of the Church and the university, but also on questions such as whether theology still has a place in the academy and what place that might be. Continue Reading...