Religion & Liberty Online Archives

History

February 26, 2019

Natural rights versus American individualism

Today, it’s common to hear many people declaring their desires or conveniences to be rights. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan, or even having one’s college tuition bills footed, for example, are routinely touted as “basic human rights.” Continue Reading...
February 13, 2019

Sometimes enlightened love just ain’t enough

“What is love?” This question perhaps was most famously posed by the mononymous 1990s philosopher-poet, Haddaway. Among the ponderers of this question, Enlightenment philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau, Smith, and Kant are not as easily remembered, lacking as they did Haddaway’s infectious hook. Continue Reading...
February 11, 2019

Peter Jackson’s World War I film is superb

In 1909, the British scholar and later Nobel Peace Prize winner, Sir Norman Angell, published a short pamphlet entitled Europe’s Optical Illusion. Subsequently republished a year later as The Great Illusion, Angell argued that the economic cost of a mass war in the industrial capitalist world would be so great, that, if it happened at all, it would be momentary. Continue Reading...
February 06, 2019

The ideological appropriation of Winston Churchill

If you’ve never watched Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, please do so. This is one of the best films about World War II ever made. Nolan, known for such works as The Dark Knight and Interstellar, was able to seize all the intensity, despair, courage, and hope present in one of the most dramatic moments of that war and in all of modern British history. 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...
January 16, 2019

Brexit and demophobia

Last night, the UK Parliament rejected Prime Minister Theresa May’s proposal towards an agreed exit from the European Union that would keep North Ireland part of the EU. And here we go again. Continue Reading...