Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Freedom of Conscience

May 02, 2019

The dangers of Catholic anti-liberalism

Korey D. Maas, associate professor of history at Hillsdale College, has written a timely warning to American Catholics at Public Discourse titled, ‘The Coming Anti-Catholicism.’ Maas begins his essay with a recounting of the early history of American anti-Catholicism, its mitigation in the 1960s, and its troubling resurgence in recent years: The combined effects of Camelot and the Council were to make political anti-Catholicism gauche almost overnight. Continue Reading...
January 21, 2019

The demonization of the Covington Catholic school boys

Sadly, it is becoming increasingly challenging to hold and freely express unpopular or unconventional ideas in the United States. If possible legal sanctions are not yet a reality, the social environment is increasingly hostile toward those who dare not pray according to the gospel of political correctness. Continue Reading...
January 16, 2019

Homeschooling a parent’s choice, not the state’s

Decades ago, when I was first ordained a priest, I shared a prejudice that many people hold: I thought homeschooling families were odd. I believed schooling children at home deprived such children of opportunities to be with other children causing them to be less able to communicate with others, socially awkward and reclusive and narrow in their experience and understanding of the world that they would one day have to grow up in and navigate. Continue Reading...
September 13, 2017

The spiritual core of liberty

Last week FEE published an essay by economist Dierdre McCloskey titled “The Core of Liberty is Economic Liberty.” McCloskey writes, [E]conomic liberty is the liberty about which most ordinary people care. Continue Reading...
February 21, 2017

When morality evaporates

When Tzvetan Todorov died on Feb. 7, the Bulgarian/French philosopher and literary critic was lamented only in certain intellectual ghettoes. To the men and women eulogizing Todorov in these circles, he was feted properly if not stingily, which is most unfortunate. Continue Reading...
July 08, 2016

Don Quixote, Pioneer of Religious Freedom

The Spanish novelist Cervantes wrote his famous tale about a knight-errant almost 200 years before the the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was adopted. But as Eric C. Graf, Professor of Literature at Universidad Francisco Marroquín, explains, Don Quixote paved the way for freedom of religious conscience by championing the freedom to think or believe what you want in your head. Continue Reading...