Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Virtue

September 15, 2020

The government should scratch the lottery

State lotteries may seem like a good thing. They raise money for government programs like public schools. People contribute their money voluntarily (unlike most forms of taxation), which removes the moral weight involved in forcing people to hand over their money. Continue Reading...
September 04, 2020

How to beat the ‘social recession’ of COVID-19

Before the COVID-19 crisis began, America was already facing a severe loneliness epidemic – marked by decades-long increases in suicide and chronic loneliness and declines in marriage and community attachment. Now, amid flurries of sweeping lockdowns, the struggle has become harder still, pushing any remnants of embodied community deeper into the confines of social media. Continue Reading...
July 28, 2020

Toppling statues tears at the 3 pillars of the West

Were he alive today, what would C.S. Lewis say about the ongoing, violent riots and church desecration being led by “trained Marxists”? As it turns out, we know. The answer lies in a letter that Lewis wrote about UK social protests 80 years ago, which reads as though it were a news dispatch from Portland’s federal courthouse. Continue Reading...
February 26, 2020

Reviving civil society: Formative vs. performative institutions

In the wake of modernity, we’ve seen plenty of disruption across American life—political, social, economic, and otherwise. Alongside the glorious expansion of freedom and prosperity, we’ve also seen new waves of fragmentation, isolation, and materialism—a “liberal paradox,” as Gaylen Byker once described it, “a hunger for meaning and values in an age of freedom and plenty.” Continue Reading...
January 23, 2020

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s crass Marxist materialism

During a Martin Luther King Day discussion with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., made clear that she is not just a democratic socialist but a Marxian one. Evie Fordham of Fox Business has written a helpful summary of the remarks, including Ocasio-Cortez’s concise explanation of the Marxist theory of the exploitation of labor: “No one ever makes a billion dollars. Continue Reading...