Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Reviews

November 26, 2025

Avalon Is Thanksgiving for America

Barry Levinson was one of the most successful directors in America around 1990, when he made Avalon, an immigrant Thanksgiving movie trying to sum up the transformation of the American family in the 20th century. Continue Reading...
November 25, 2025

Rage Against the Machine. Or Don’t.

It’s unusual to be in the situation of reviewing a book no one will like. I don’t mean that literally; a handful of people will appreciate Paul Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine, probably the same people who have followed his work for the past decade. Continue Reading...
November 19, 2025

COVID and the Craving for Certainty

In March of 2020, I published an essay warning both the public and our policymakers against overreacting to the COVID threat. We overreact, I argued, in times of “epistemic uncertainty,” when we do not know enough about a threat we face and are unclear about our best response. Continue Reading...
November 13, 2025

Liberalism Revisited

For the past decade or so, we have become more accustomed to speak of a “crisis” of liberalism. No doubt that is one reason why Notre Dame Press has chosen to re-release David Walsh’s The Growth of the Liberal Soul. Continue Reading...
November 12, 2025

Amy Coney Barrett Listens to the Law

Many Americans wonder if any jurist on the U.S. Supreme Court will ever be able to fill the shoes of the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia, who passed in 2016. President Trump has—so far—appointed three avowedly originalist justices with the potential to do so. Continue Reading...
November 11, 2025

Twelfth Night Revels, Revelations, and the Death of Rabelais

In the Christian calendar, the Feast of the Epiphany marks the coming of the Magi, whose journey signals the first revelation of the Incarnation to the wider world. With Epiphany, the days of Christmas end, though the afterglow of the Nativity lingers until Candlemas, on February 2: the feast of the presentation of the Christ Child in the temple, when the Church recalls another recognition. Continue Reading...
October 28, 2025

Our Philo-Semitic History

To hold in one’s hands a book like Josh Hammer’s Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish State and the Destiny of the West is the kind of privilege that comes with residency in the civilized West. Continue Reading...
October 16, 2025

How the Church Once Governed

The prelapsarian order enjoys a diversity of interpretations in the modern imagination. For some, it represents a prosperous symbiotic relationship between an originally vegetarian human civilization and creation: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it” (Gen. Continue Reading...