Post Tagged 'free will'

March 12, 2025

Ross Douthat Wants You to Believe

In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Ross Douthat relates a story from a couple of decades ago, in which he had a late-night conversation with the famously combative atheist Christopher Hitchens. Continue Reading...

March 11, 2025

Are You Free?

The early Protestant Reformers famously disbelieved in the freedom of the will. And yet they gave us a legacy of freedom. This paradox is at the heart of Brad Littlejohn’s Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. Continue Reading...

September 29, 2023

Are We Free to Think About Free Will?

Does God exist, or are we the mere by-products of evolution, simple accidents of the Big Bang? Do we have free will, or is everything predetermined, robbing us of true moral agency? Continue Reading...

July 30, 2014

Consumerism, Service, and Religion

Today at The Imaginative Conservative, Fr. Dwight Longenecker, in an excerpt from his recent book, bemoans what he sees as “The Spoiling of America.” While sympathetic to his support for self-discipline, I find his analysis of our consumer culture to be myopic. Continue Reading...

December 17, 2013

Liberty in Two Keys

When we think of our freedoms and how they are basic to our society yet freedoms seem to be out of control in so many ways since the 1960s, we probably need to pull back and consider those freedoms from a new perspective. Continue Reading...

July 17, 2013

Lord Acton on Catholic and Modern Views of Liberty

One of the more famous quotes from the eminently quotable Lord Acton is his dictum, “Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.” Continue Reading...

October 09, 2012

Video: Do You Have Free Will?

At the online Prager University, lecturer Frank Pastore asks: “Do you have the ability to shape your own destiny? Is there a difference between your mind and your brain? Or is free will just a convenient delusion? Continue Reading...

September 15, 2008

The foundations of understanding the market, understanding man

I am a great fan of “back to basics.” This is because the general population does not know what the educated person of my youth knew. Let’s take college education. The undergraduate university I attended had a heavy core curriculum. Continue Reading...

July 26, 2006

Protestants and Natural Law, Part 7

In Parts 5 and 6 we addressed the two most common Protestant objections to natural law. And now, as promised, we will see what limitations the Reformers perceived in natural law, even as they affirmed its value. Continue Reading...