Search results

My Body to Be Burned 0
- May/June 2015
- May 1, 2015
Today we wouldn’t burn a man alive for what he believes, but our ancestors did. And when you look at the pictures, see what their hands wrote, and look into the faces sleeping in stone and bronze above their bones, they don’t appear much difference from us. Yet they extirpated dissent by burning, and it
READ MORE
Virtue and Freedom 0
- May/June 2015
- May 1, 2015
In civilized discourse it is essential that proper distinctions be made. This I find is especially true in discussions regarding freedom, lest, in attempting to explain it to others, we end up with merely explaining it away. Mortimer Adler tells us in his two-volume work, The Idea of Freedom, that there are three basic senses
READ MORE
Freeing the Church to Be the Church 0
- May/June 2015
- May 1, 2015
The South in which I grew up was rather rebellious toward the actions of the federal government. The slowness of the school systems to heed the Supreme Court’s school prayer ruling in Engel v. Vitale (1962) demonstrated that pretty clearly. I can remember daily organized prayer in school as late as 1973. I can also
READ MORE

Inconvenient History 0
- May/June 2015
- May 1, 2015
The late novelist Gore Vidal spoke of America once as “the United States of Amnesia.” This condition was highlighted all too painfully by the response of many conservative Christians to a remark made by President Obama during the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, 2015. Evoking Christian Atrocities Specifically, President Obama’s address noted that while decent
READ MORE
Ron Carelli and the Duplessis Affair 0
- March/April 2015
- March 9, 2015
Jehovah’s Witnesses have been victims of persecution in many countries, Canada and the United States among them. In the United States the persecution has often been a reaction, especially during wartime, to their lack of adherence to expected standards of patriotism. They do not vote, they refuse to salute the flag, and they will not
READ MORE
Security and Liberty 0
- March/April 2015
- March 9, 2015
Why should American Muslims be the subject of secretive investigations and surveillance if their religious values and practices do not threaten American democratic values? Islamic Compatibility Bernard Lewis identifies classical Islam as a theocracy on a par with that of ancient Israel: “Among the Jews, for whose beliefs Josephus coined the term ‘theocracy,’ God was
READ MORE