Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Reviews

February 20, 2025

Rediscover the Beauty of Weakness

It seems everyone is talking about how there just aren’t enough babies. The worldwide birth deficit has hit Western nations hard: From the U.S. to Europe, nations have slid below the 2.1 children per woman necessary to keep population stable. Continue Reading...
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...