The Religious Freedom Amendment

The Religious Freedom Amendment by Paul Miller Given the inevitable dangers, I am more comfortable with a larger role for religion in public life than a smaller one. A larger role at least allows a plurality of faiths to flourish and for believers and unbelievers alike to see and consider various manifestations of religion. That seems more consistent with limited government and might be a helpful check against the concomitant tendency towards Caesaropapism. State-enforced secularism, on the other hand, drives out religion from the public square entirely in favor of a government-sponsored ideology, which is inconsistent with the right to liberty of conscience and human flourishing...  [MORE] The Greatest Book Never Written by Gleaves Whitney "Lord Acton is the prophet who foresaw our times," my new advisor, Professor Stephen Tonsor opined. "He anticipated the dangers of statism. But ironically he is now a setting star—passé and remote. This, it must be said, is a tragedy of his own making. It’s a mystery why he never wrote his planned magnum opus, The History of Liberty—the book he was meant to write. Everyone around him waited years for the work to appear, but it never did and posterity is the worse for it." I listened in silence to this remarkable lesson on Lord Acton and tried to be comfortable with the pause that ensued. But my mind would not be still. What with his dizzying erudition, Tonsor had given me much to ponder. I had never heard a teacher speak in this manner before...  [MORE] When Men Became Human:  Christopher Dawson’s 500 BC by Bradley Birzer Christopher Dawson attempted to understand the very essence and heart of history. Certainly, the moment-by-moment unfolding and detailing of the past mattered, but only as these served as a means to understand the larger currents of thought and the human condition. It was the sea changes in thought and consciousness across cultures and over time that most interested him as scholar and thinker. He remained firmly convinced that the development of Natural Law did not randomly emerge from individual genius, but rather believed that individual genius arose out of the various traditions and norms of each people. Of course, this makes the awareness of Natural Law in four major but distinct peoples even more interesting...  [MORE] How Flannery O’Connor Can Heal Our Fractured Politics Jonathan Edwards: Founding Father of American Political Thought George Panichas, the Moral Imagination, & the Conservative Mind The Shakespeare Scholar Who Crossed Swords with C.S. Lewis On the Passing of a Philosophy How to Keep Your Virtue in College Augustine: A Saint for Eternity Romano Guardini & the Dissolution of Western Culture “Break, Break, Break” “The Author’s Outcry”