Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Reviews

February 19, 2026

Do You Have to Go Rural for a Good Life?

Dana Milbank was once one of the most insufferable of The Washington Post’s reporters and columnists. For decades, Milbank gained a reputation for serial exaggeration and distortion, such as misrepresenting his interview subjects. Continue Reading...
February 18, 2026

Marty Supreme and the Return of the Antihero

Most Oscar movies have no audience and few admirers and are instantly forgotten (name last year’s winner). One exception is Marty Supreme, which has just received nine Oscar nominations. More surprising, it has already reached into the IMDb Top 250, at 238 and climbing (dedicated fanbase). Continue Reading...
February 10, 2026

We Can’t Afford to Ditch the Rich

Why Democracy Needs the Rich by John O. McGinnis arrives at a moment when public discourse treats wealth less as a social fact and more as a moral pathology. Consequently, McGinnis writes into an atmosphere thick with slogans, suspicion, and ritual denunciation. Continue Reading...
February 05, 2026

Modern Times for Our Time

What we call Western civilization is in a precarious state today, challenged by the loss of religious values, a threat from aroused Islamic radicalism, romantic notions of “collectivism,” and a dangerous decline in the value of freedom of speech and thought. Continue Reading...
February 04, 2026

The Prodigal of Leningrad

In my memories, December 31 in Leningrad, Russia, was always cold. Of course, the city has been called St. Petersburg, its pre-Revolutionary name, for much of my life, but for the almost decade that I lived there, it was Leningrad. Continue Reading...
January 28, 2026

Progress and Its Enemies

What ultimately drives economic growth and development? Is it culture, institutions, norms, innovation, technology, or some combination of all these things and other factors? Is there any way in which we can organize societies that will allow them to escape mass impoverishment? Continue Reading...
January 22, 2026

One Box Office Battle After Another

Who’s going to win big at the Oscars? I know: Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, its title taken from a statement published in 1969 by the revolutionary-terrorist organization the Weather Underground. Continue Reading...
January 14, 2026

Pornocracy and the Limits of Legal Limits

It’s not often that you find a cause that unites a progressive like feminist professor Catharine MacKinnon of the University of Michigan Law School and conservative Catholics and evangelicals. A crusade to pass anti-porn ordinances and statutes was just that cause in the early 1980s. Continue Reading...
January 13, 2026

A Very British America

In the popular imagination, at least, the American Revolution has become synonymous with anti-monarchism. Left- and right-wingers seek to drape their ideological causes in patriotic slogans and images that could be taken wholesale from Thomas Paine’s radical democratic pamphlet Common Sense. Continue Reading...