Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Reviews

August 26, 2025

Can the Secular Point to the Transcendent?

It was once considered obvious, at least to those in the know, that religion and other superstitions would fade as science made God unnecessary, implausible, and eventually ridiculous. Primitive humans saw gods lurking everywhere because of their ignorance of natural causes, perhaps, and the need for God to fill in the “gaps” of our explanations would in principle disappear. Continue Reading...
August 19, 2025

Frank Meyer: The Triumphs of Mr. Fusionism

As political divisions widen across the American right on topics ranging from the proper conduct of economic policy to the United States’ relationship with the rest of the world, considerable attention has been given to the ensemble of ideas given the label “fusionism.” Continue Reading...
August 13, 2025

Hail Corporate Britannia

One of the dominant memes of the 21st century is that of the Great Man (or Great Woman) theory of history. In this view, the 1500s was the century of (seemingly innumerable) great men and women, ranging from Sir Francis Drake, Elizabeth I, and Catherine de Medici to Philip II and many more. Continue Reading...
August 07, 2025

Tech and Teens

When school principal Christina Mehaffey first saw the Discover page of Snapchat, she could not believe what she was seeing. The algorithm of an app that was ubiquitous on the phones of her students at Faustina Academy was promoting content that was unambiguously pornographic. Continue Reading...
August 05, 2025

J.R.R. Tolkien: Writing as Discovery

I am a self-proclaimed Inklings appreciator. From C.S. Lewis’s critical essays to Charles Williams’s doctrinal horror novels to Owen Barfield’s strange and marvelous metaphysic of symbols, this little group of writers has my heart. Continue Reading...
July 31, 2025

The Myth-Busting, Poverty-Curing Power of Free Markets

In their new book, The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism, former Senator Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux, George Mason University professor of economics, challenge seven widely held but false views of capitalism and markets, which fuel an overreliance on government. Continue Reading...
July 30, 2025

William F. Buckley Jr.: A Man for Our Season

Sam Tanenhaus’s new biography of William F. Buckley Jr. is not just another book—it is an event. The National Review founder originally authorized Tanenhaus to write it in the 1990s, inspired by the strength of Tanenhaus’s biography of the anticommunist journalist Whittaker Chambers. Continue Reading...
July 29, 2025

Eddington Is COVID

Eddington is not supposed to be a horror movie. This might be a surprise to fans of the writer-director also responsible for the demented supernatural family drama Hereditary and the Wicker Man–esque neo-pagan nightmare Midsommar. Continue Reading...
July 24, 2025

Tickling the Ivies: Can Higher Education Be Saved?

Every now and then you read a book so simple in concept and so interesting in outcome that you kick yourself for not having come up with the idea. Many people have a sense that higher education has jumped the rails in a variety of ways, but mostly that sense gets fed by anecdote and rumor and clickbait. Continue Reading...