Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Free Speech

October 07, 2019

Free kids, free society: Overcoming the myths of ‘safetyism’

As America’s “great awokening” continues to unfold, we see the emergence of a peculiar new brand of safetyism and self-protectionism. Whether observed in the range of student-led riots and intimidation efforts at college campuses or the fear-mongering of white nationalists, the foundations of liberal democracy are increasingly being called into question—all that a select set of personal beliefs, fears, and anxieties might somehow be appeased. Continue Reading...
August 20, 2019

Understanding the words we use

Today, we face a prevalent problem when making arguments about trending topics. Words such as capitalism, socialism, conservative, liberal and other broad categorical terms all have a wide range of meanings and emotions attached to them. Continue Reading...
August 02, 2019

The UK porn ban

In the United Kingdom, the government has taken many steps to ensure the protection of children from pornography and other adult material; most recently an Age Verification law was scheduled to be legislated on July 15 but has again been pushed back. Continue Reading...
July 18, 2019

Minority views? Priceless

There’s something in our DNA to feel threatened by ideas that challenge our own. History is haunted by tragic examples of the suppression of minority views, whether it be Athens killing Socrates (399 BC), the Roman Inquisition’s placing Galileo under house arrest for advocating heliocentrism (1632), Nazi book burning (1933), or the persecution of many thousands of academics during the Cultural Revolution (1966). Continue Reading...
April 16, 2019

Left-wing college administrators are a mirror of American political reality

Samuel J. Abrams’ article Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators published by the New York Times last October was a turning point in his life. Abrams, a political science professor at Sarah Lawrence College, has been living through a hellish backlash that involved “a national media storm in which I was slandered and defamed, my family’s safety was threatened, and my personal property was destroyed on campus.” Continue Reading...
February 12, 2019

Camille Paglia: The fearless feminist

True thinkers are those capable of provoking in their readers and listeners the ability to think outside of ordinary life, to look beyond the merely conventional, and to understand that tensions, contradictions, and nuances are part of the process of growing. Continue Reading...
January 21, 2019

The demonization of the Covington Catholic school boys

Sadly, it is becoming increasingly challenging to hold and freely express unpopular or unconventional ideas in the United States. If possible legal sanctions are not yet a reality, the social environment is increasingly hostile toward those who dare not pray according to the gospel of political correctness. Continue Reading...
December 11, 2018

An Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn centenary

On this day in 1918, Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, Russia, to Taisia and Isaaki Solzhenitsyn, parents of peasant stock who had received a university education. Continue Reading...