Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Reviews

January 28, 2026

Progress and Its Enemies

What ultimately drives economic growth and development? Is it culture, institutions, norms, innovation, technology, or some combination of all these things and other factors? Is there any way in which we can organize societies that will allow them to escape mass impoverishment? Continue Reading...
January 22, 2026

One Box Office Battle After Another

Who’s going to win big at the Oscars? I know: Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, its title taken from a statement published in 1969 by the revolutionary-terrorist organization the Weather Underground. Continue Reading...
January 14, 2026

Pornocracy and the Limits of Legal Limits

It’s not often that you find a cause that unites a progressive like feminist professor Catharine MacKinnon of the University of Michigan Law School and conservative Catholics and evangelicals. A crusade to pass anti-porn ordinances and statutes was just that cause in the early 1980s. Continue Reading...
January 13, 2026

A Very British America

In the popular imagination, at least, the American Revolution has become synonymous with anti-monarchism. Left- and right-wingers seek to drape their ideological causes in patriotic slogans and images that could be taken wholesale from Thomas Paine’s radical democratic pamphlet Common Sense. Continue Reading...
January 08, 2026

The Science of God, the God of Science

Philosophy, Aristotle observed, begins in wonder. Too often today, however, philosophy begins in arid formulas that look more like math equations than like curiosity about the great questions of life—“Does God exist?” Continue Reading...
January 07, 2026

His Stylus Was Mightier Than His Sword

Sometime in the late 340s B.C. in Athens, a feud between two powerful men, Apollodoros and Stephanos, culminated in the last of a series of lawsuits that the two had been bringing against each other for the better part of a decade. Continue Reading...
December 30, 2025

St. Augustine: Out of Africa

Quite a number of years ago, it was estimated that every year there are some 500 articles and monographs, both popular and scholarly, written throughout the world on the North African pastor-theologian-saint Augustine (354‒430). Continue Reading...
December 29, 2025

Is America Simply Jefferson vs. Hamilton?

Herbert Butterfield in his The Whig Interpretation of History argued that assessing the past in light of the present, what we call “presentism,” is the source of all historical errors. Our tendency to do so results from a very real problem: How do we impose some sort of narrative order on the complex, disparate, and voluminous material presented in historical reflection? Continue Reading...
December 23, 2025

A Book That Will Shock You

Dr. Michael Pakaluk, a philosopher and professor at the Catholic University of America, has written 11 books, but somehow this was the first to make it into my hands. Pakaluk is a bit of a legend in certain circles. Continue Reading...