Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Reviews

June 04, 2025

Liberalism All the Way Down

In 2009, the economist Tyler Cowen began a TEDx Talk in open subversion of the format, telling the audience: “I was told to come here and tell you all stories, but what I’d like to do is instead tell you why I’m suspicious of stories. Continue Reading...
June 03, 2025

The Startling History of Capitol Hill Baptist Church

Whether in the Southern Baptist Convention or the American evangelical movement more broadly, the past 10 years have been rife with political and cultural controversy. Broader shifts in the direction of extreme polarization have infected the church perhaps more than any other social institution. Continue Reading...
May 28, 2025

Andor Understands that Politics Is About Love

Whittaker Chambers couldn’t have predicted that his defection from the Communist Party would start because of a toddler. It was the 1930s, and Chambers—an American spying for the Soviets—was watching his young daughter messily eat in her high chair. Continue Reading...
May 27, 2025

Our Dystopian Second Reality

The first paragraph of Daniel J. Mahoney’s The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now redeems the $29.99 price of admission. In a sentence therein, Mahoney states his thesis: The “ideological” project to replace the only human condition we know with a utopian “Second Reality” oblivious to—indeed at war with—the deepest wellsprings of human nature and God’s creation has taken on renewed virulence in the late modern world, just thirty-five years after the glorious anti-totalitarian revolutions of 1989. Continue Reading...
May 07, 2025

What Is Marriage?

In 2014, Anthony Esolen published Defending Marriage, responding to the effort to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. In it, he argues that the fight over redefining marriage was lost long before this specific policy battle, when we began to lose sight of marriage as a permanent, exclusive, fruitful bond between husband and wife. Continue Reading...
May 01, 2025

The Silence of God in Our Suffering

In his new book, Where Is God in a World with So Much Evil?, Collin Hansen, vice president for content and editor-in-chief for The Gospel Coalition and executive director of the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, takes on one of the most challenging apologetic issues: the problem of evil. Continue Reading...
April 30, 2025

Feminists Against the Sexual Revolution

Late modernity has inherited a revolutionary spirit, and sex is the easiest place to see that spirit and its costs. The harms of the Sexual Revolution are rampant: Dating culture has collapsed; hookup culture is unsatisfying; the decline in marriage and birth rates have become a rallying cry for policymakers and conservatives alike. Continue Reading...
April 24, 2025

At Home in the Greatest Show

In the early 20th century, my north Jersey hometown was briefly the winter headquarters of the Ringling Bros’ circus, a fact that added no small amount of color to the local lore. Continue Reading...