Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Reviews

January 28, 2025

Reading Genesis with Marilynne Robinson

The best part of Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson is Genesis. I make this observation sincerely, intending no disparagement of Robinson’s insightful reading of the first book of the Bible. But it was a surprise and delight to pick up Reading Genesis, thumb through it for the first time, and discover that the last third of its 344 pages consists of the book of Genesis itself. Continue Reading...
January 24, 2025

The Brutalist Is Nothing Less than Brutal

Who is Brady Corbet? In the avalanche of press coverage that has accompanied the release of The Brutalist, which he co-wrote and directed, Corbet has been generally spoken of as an auteur—a filmmaker’s filmmaker, a man with unusual seriousness, ambition, and purpose. Continue Reading...
January 22, 2025

Peggy Noonan’s Revolution

I was a day shy of my eighth birthday when the reassuring words of President Reagan crackled over my family’s radio. Like all Americans, we were traumatized by the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, which carried, among her passengers, 38-year-old social studies teacher Christy McAuliffe. Continue Reading...
January 21, 2025

The Soul of David Lynch

On January 16, we lost David Lynch, at age 78, just shy of his January 20 birthday. That would be January 20, 1946. Lynch was a Baby Boomer. A child of ’50s America. Continue Reading...
January 14, 2025

Thinking Critically about Critical Theory

Hope College required all seniors to take a “senior seminar,” the ostensible purpose of which was to help each student refine his or her “worldview.” Not liking, for a variety of reasons, the word worldview with its implicit relativism, I could nonetheless use the course to get students to struggle through competing “worldviews.” Continue Reading...
January 09, 2025

The Historian as Priestly Gardener

Contemporary Western culture is profoundly ahistorical, Sarah Irving-Stonebraker reasons in her latest book, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age. The Australian professor devotes the first quarter of the book to making the case that, around 2010, the occidental world entered this “phase of late modernity,” to which she assigns the moniker “the Ahistoric Age.” Continue Reading...
January 08, 2025

Jordan Peterson’s Bible Study

If there’s one thing Jordan B. Peterson has proved in his almost-decade run as an internationally known public intellectual, it’s that he can fight. Since his 2016 criticism of a Canadian law for effectively compelling speech related to the use of certain gender pronouns, the professional psychologist and academic has taken on a host of rhetorical sparring partners on Canadian, British, and Australian television; he’s also argued with prominent politicians, scientists, academics, and bloggers. Continue Reading...