Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Christian Social Thought

Is the Bail System Inherently Unjust?

Prepping for the joint Acton/Liberty Fund sponsored conference that begins tonight: Religion & Liberty: Acton and Tocqueville, part of Acton’s Liberty and Markets program, I came across the following thought-provoking quote from Alexis de Tocqueville: The civil and criminal legislation of the Americans knows only two means of action: prison or bail. Continue Reading...

Bastiat on My Mind

One night during either my sophomore or junior year of college, while delaying the doing of homework by walking around the upstairs of Taylor University’s library looking for embarrassing books I could hide in friends’ backpacks so the alarm would go off when we walked out together and they’d have to sheepishly present them at the front desk, I stumbled upon a little treatise called The Law by some French dude named Frederic Bastiat I had never heard of.  Continue Reading...

Rev. Sirico: One Election Cannot Fix What Ails Us

Writing for National Review Online, Rev. Robert A. Sirico offers three salient points about last night’s election: 1. Americans give signs of moving in a morally and politically more progressive direction, by which I mean that the appeal to the wisdom of past ages and tradition is simply not as compelling as it once was. Continue Reading...

What Happened

It is clear that what President Barack Obama has achieved is historic: Being re-elected when not a single one of his major initiatives has enjoyed broad popular support. What is also clear is that the moral and spiritual demographics of the United States have changed considerably.  Continue Reading...

Wisdom & Wonder & Interdisciplinary Studies

I was recently invited to write an essay on the importance of interdisciplinary studies for the Calvin Seminary student publication Kerux. In my essay “The Truth is One,” I reflect on the famous quote of Abraham Kuyper, [N]o single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: “Mine!” Continue Reading...

Government Jobs and Social Uplift

In the Nov/Dec issue of Touchstone, I have a piece on the issue of whether government jobs can act as a lever for opportunity and social mobility. My answer is a highly qualified “yes” with a number of cultural caveats. Continue Reading...