When Shrugging is Not an Option
- May/June 2025
- April 30, 2025
It is time for the faith community to take a more visible stand on gun control. Flags out front at half-staff . . . thoughts and prayers. The silence is deafening. Where is the church? Who among us stands with the teens from Parkland? Teenagers attend our Bible schools every week. We love them dearly;
READ MOREWhen the world changes too rapidly, people become fearful. When people become fearful, conflicts erupt. Conflicts destroy what little security people have left. A little more than 77 years ago the United States faced unprecedented menace, instability, uncertainty, and violence. Europe was in convulsion. Refugees by the millions were streaming across the violated borders. England,
READ MOREOnly a few days before this issue of Liberty went to press its longest-serving editor went to his rest. Roland R. Hegstad edited Liberty for one-third of its tenure. For many of us in the religious liberty world he had long since become a legend. For me, a Seventh-day Adventist editor, he had long been
READ MOREThis summer the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision in a difficult case that pits the free exercise of religion and free speech rights of a wedding cake maker against the rights of a same-sex couple to be accommodated in the marketplace. The couple demands the cake; the baker refuses because he
READ MOREWhen Whittaker Chambers, the chief witness against Soviet spy Alger Hiss, reduced the cold war down to faith in God versus faith in man, anti-Communist secularists pounced. Leading the charge was the atheistic anti-Communist professor Sidney Hook, who asserted that the backbone of the resistance to Communism was made up of secularists like him. But
READ MOREIf Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), the celebrated French author of Democracy in America, awakened in present-day America, he would likely be deeply shocked by the polarization, radicalism, and most of all the hostility between liberalism and religion. For what he found so exceptional during his visit to America in the 1830s was that, contrary to
READ MOREOn December 6, 2017, President Donald Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The decree fulfilled one of several campaign promises he made in an effort to woo evangelical voters. That strategy paid off, as 81 percent of White evangelicals cast their votes for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. The president’s edict
READ MOREIllustration by Robert Hunt The recent Dakota Access Pipeline saga reminds us of the long ongoing struggle for Native American rights. Dakota Territory, July 1874 Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer clinched the reigns of his regal brown-and-white sorrel horse, then squinted hard into the distance. Ahead lay a dark patch sprawled across the ascending Dakota
READ MOREDuring the time of the Inquisition Goa, India, was the location of Inquisitorial proceedings led by the Catholic Church. Several centuries later it appears that karma has played out its hand in a role reversal. In modern India a militant pro-Hindu revival has resulted in the violent deaths of Christians (and Muslims)—and even the strangulation
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