Religion & Liberty Online Archives

News and Events

October 14, 2005

Through rain, sleet, and privatization

Any predictions on how this will turn out? All eyes should be watching Japan, whose legislature just approved the privatization of their postal service. (It is important to note that the Japanese postal service is markedly different from ours here in the States.) Continue Reading...
October 13, 2005

Harriet miers and proper jurisprudence

Acton President Rev. Robert A. Sirico appeared yesterday on Your World with Neil Cavuto on the Fox News Channel and discussed the president’s nomination of Harriet Miers to replace Sandra Day O’Connor as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Continue Reading...
September 29, 2005

Submerged subsidiarity

Because too much has already been said about the recent gulf hurricanes, I won’t put in my two cents. I will, however, direct the reader to the most insightful take on this situation that I have yet to stumble across. Continue Reading...
September 22, 2005

Breathing with one lung?

Bishop Hilarion (Alfeyev) of Vienna and Austria, the Russian Orthodox Church’s representative to the European Union, is once again urging a Roman Catholic-Orthodox alliance to combat secularism, liberalism and relativism in Europe — and lands outside it. Continue Reading...
September 15, 2005

Katrina: A chance to escape the welfare trap?

The Wall Street Journal editorializes today that President Bush has a chance to encourage a more free-market oriented approach to rebuilding the gulf coast: Instead of channeling more cash through the same failed bureaucracies, he should declare the entire Gulf Coast region an enterprise zone, with low tax rates for new investments and waivers for any regulatory obstacles to rebuilding. Continue Reading...
September 15, 2005

Natural law and targeting whirlybirds

Psychiatrist and author Theodore Dalrymple has published a brilliant essay in the National Review highlighting the importance of the rule of law. He takes as a case study the looting in the wake of Hurricane Katrina: “New Orleans shows us in the starkest possible way the reality of the thin blue line that protects us from barbarism and mob rule,” writes Dalrymple. Continue Reading...
September 07, 2005

‘Maintain Social Order’

In a move that sets a dangerous precedent in an already muddled area, U.S. immigration officials revoked the asylum of a Chinese Christian who had been imprisoned for organizing underground church meetings. Continue Reading...
September 06, 2005

The state of nature in New Orleans

Thomas Hobbes once described human life in the “state of nature” as that of war, in which, in addition to the lack of learning, commerce, and the arts, there is “continual fear, and danger of a violent death. Continue Reading...
September 02, 2005

Principled giving

The devastation that we have seen this week in the Gulf Coast region and especially New Orleans is almost beyond our capacity to understand. Our instinct is to do something – anything – to help those in need, but when the crisis is this huge, what does one do? Continue Reading...