Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Human flourishing

October 14, 2020

The forgotten child: Pandemic policies are leaving kids behind

The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed many victims, from the millions who have contracted the virus directly to many others who continue to endure its social and economic disruptions. The suffering has been particularly acute for the children who continue to be confined at home, whether struggling to adapt to remote-learning regimens or remaining mysteriously absent altogether. Continue Reading...
September 11, 2020

David French’s Christian vision for economic freedom

Given the recent wave of populism and protectionism sweeping across the American Right, we see increased criticism of free markets among conservatives – complete with lengthy debates about the purpose of the nation-state, the role of the market in civil society, and whether classical liberalism has any enduring value in an age of technological disruption and globalization. Continue Reading...
September 04, 2020

How to beat the ‘social recession’ of COVID-19

Before the COVID-19 crisis began, America was already facing a severe loneliness epidemic – marked by decades-long increases in suicide and chronic loneliness and declines in marriage and community attachment. Now, amid flurries of sweeping lockdowns, the struggle has become harder still, pushing any remnants of embodied community deeper into the confines of social media. Continue Reading...
August 20, 2020

Work like Daniel: economic witness in a post-Christian age

America is seeing a steady rise in secularization, pronounced by accelerating declines in religious identification, church attendance, and biblical literacy. As the norms of “cultural Christianity” continue to fade, the call to “be in but not of the world” is stirring new questions about how we live, create, and collaborate in modern society. Continue Reading...
August 18, 2020

The futility of artificial intelligence economics

Salesforce, an American cloud-based software company, earlier this year announced an initiative to develop an artificial intelligence economist. Stephan Zheng, the lead research scientist at Salesforce Research, describes the moonshot goal of this project as to “build a reinforcement learning framework that will recommend economic policies that drive social outcomes in the real world, such as improving sustainability, productivity, and equality.” Continue Reading...
August 12, 2020

Cuba loosens restrictions on private businesses to battle COVID-19

Over the past decade, Cuba’s private sector has experienced slow-but-steady growth thanks to a mix of entrepreneurial grit and incremental policy changes. Although the Communist government continues to waffle on the scope and duration of various restrictions, the number of self-employed Cubans has risen from 150,000 to 600,000 since 2010 – that is, until the outbreak of the global health pandemic. Continue Reading...