Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Religious Liberty

August 12, 2013

New Book Looks at the Coptic Exodus from Egypt

In The Wall Street Journal, Michael J. Totten reviews Motherland Lost: The Egyptian and Coptic Quest for Modernity (Hoover Institution, 236 pages, $19.95) by Samuel Tadros. Totten says the book offers a scholarly account of the ongoing exodus of Christians from Egypt, where the “most dramatic” decline of Christianity in the Middle East is now occuring. Continue Reading...
August 07, 2013

For America’s Elites, Religious Freedom is a Non-Issue

America’s Founding Fathers considered religious liberty to be our “first freedom.” But as Ken Blackwell notes, that view is no longer shared by our media and foreign policy elites: All such understandings of the religious freedom foundation of American civil liberty and foreign policy seem long forgotten by the elites of today. Continue Reading...
August 05, 2013

Europe’s Curious Conception of Religious Freedom

By failing to recognize the importance of religion and its relationship to human rights, says Roger Trigg, European courts are progressively eroding religious liberty: [T]he Council of Europe affirmed in 2007 that “states must require religious leaders to take an unambiguous stand in favour of the precedence of human rights, as set forth in the European Convention of Human Rights, over any religious principle.” Continue Reading...
July 24, 2013

What is Religious Freedom?

In its fullest and most robust sense, religion is the human person’s being in right relation to the divine, says Robert George, and all of us have a duty, in conscience, to seek the truth and to honor the freedom of all men and women everywhere to do the same: . Continue Reading...
July 18, 2013

Growing Religious Intolerance In Sudan

Religious intolerance is increasingly common around the world, and Sudan is one country where Christians are especially vulnerable. As a minority in a nation that is 97 percent Muslim, Christians there are worried that their right to practice their faith freely is more and more at risk. Continue Reading...
July 17, 2013

God or Gov: Loving Father or Monster Tyrant?

Fr. Benjamin Sember, a Catholic priest, has written a superb piece on the dangers of making the government one’s God: When a society has made the decision to live without God, that society inevitably begins to rely on the Government to do everything that God used to do: to declare what is right and what is wrong, to protect the innocent and punish the guilty, divide the wheat from the chaff and throw the evildoers into maximum security prison, to protect and care for orphans and the widows, to give healing to the sick, and to guarantee stability, security, prosperity, and peace. Continue Reading...
July 05, 2013

Praying For Human Flourishing and Human Suffering

One of the consistent themes in Christian social teaching is the recognition that this world has both material and spiritual realities. As such, it is not only important that we think about the moral, political, and economic structures that contribute to set the stage for human flourishing but that we also pray for those who are suffering that they would be free to live out their callings as human persons made in God’s image. Continue Reading...