Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Reviews

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...
October 15, 2025

Calvinist Critical Theory

God at Work: Loving God and Neighbor Through the Book of Exodus, a new book from Anthony Bradley, Distinguished Research Fellow at the Acton Institute and professor of interdisciplinary and theological studies at Kuyper College, is not another contribution to the Faith and Work movement. Continue Reading...
October 14, 2025

Man, Not Ape

What is man that You are mindful of him, And the son of man that You visit him? For You have made him a little lower than the angels, And You have crowned him with glory and honor. Continue Reading...
October 09, 2025

Taking Charles Murray Seriously

All happy conversion stories are alike. Every unhappy conversion story is unhappy in its own way. Is how Tolstoy might have put it, if he weren’t, you know, dead. Charles Murray, he of Bell Curve fame and attendant controversy, has gotten religion. Continue Reading...
October 01, 2025

We Are All Dependent—And That’s Our Strength

Leah Libresco Sargeant’s The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto depicts a human ideal for the post-industrial workforce. Such a human can work any number of hours, has no personal entanglements, and suffers from no bodily needs: Through a combination of pressure and compensation, the company has succeeded in denying basic biological reality and making that contradiction the employees’ problem. Continue Reading...
September 30, 2025

The Virtue of Patriotism

As an American who grew up amid the Cold War, patriotism had an obvious attraction. Who wouldn’t prefer the United States of America, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, free markets, belief in God, and rock and roll over the gray, atheistic, materialistic totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. Continue Reading...
September 29, 2025

The Question of Thomas More

A new biography of a great man, especially one whose life is already rich with lore, is a delicate task. There is the temptation to attempt something new, or worse, to try to make the story “relevant”—even “urgent,” heaven forbid—by inserting into the great one’s life some zippy contemporary narrative (usually sexual). Continue Reading...
September 25, 2025

Will the Big Bang Go Pop?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Continue Reading...
September 16, 2025

Rutger Bregman’s Vision: Moral Ambition Without Imagination

We’ve all read about ideologues who had a centralized plan to save the world. Well add one more to the list. Trending right now is a man named Rutger Bregman. He is passionate, eloquent, and articulate—and he seeks to rapidly transform our country (and, indeed, the entire world) into a socialist utopia. Continue Reading...
September 10, 2025

Whose Body? Whose Self?

In Dorothy Sayers’s 1923 whodunit, Whose Body?, an unidentified dead body, naked but for a pince-nez, is mysteriously dropped off in the bathtub of a perfectly ordinary, respectable home. Who is Mr. Continue Reading...