Featured Touchstone article of the day: 08/14/2016
Love, Sex & Mammon: Hard Times, Hard Truths & the
Economics of the Christian Family by Russell D. Moore

Touchstone July / August 2016
Getting the Origins of Religious Liberty Right Matters • The Anti-Family War & Its Lies • Modern Science Has Rendered Atheism Irrational

Forum: Feature

Two Tales of Freedom

Getting the Origins of Religious Liberty Right Matters

by Matthew J. Franck

Around the world, religious freedom is threatened. In some places the threat is immediate and deadly, as when the terrorists of the Islamic State murder Christian martyrs for an international audience, and openly avow their intention of wiping out ancient communities of Jews, Christians, Yazidis, and Muslims who do not conform to their views. In other places the threat seems trivial by comparison, since no physical violence is employed, yet quite real pressure is applied, as when Catholic Charities adoption services lose their state licenses because they will place children only with families headed by a married man and woman, or when the federal government threatens the Little Sisters of the Poor with crippling fines because they will not compromise their witness to the Church's teaching on contraception. . . . Continue ➡

Forum: Response

A History of Religious Freedom

by James Hitchcock

Prior to Constantine, coercion in matters of religion was of course unthinkable to Christians, who were themselves the chief victims of such coercion. But leading theologians—Origen, Cyprian, Lactantius—did not offer a merely prudential argument. They affirmed the spiritual nature of a faith that was false if it was not freely chosen. . . . Continue ➡

Forum: Response

Toleration & Divine Forbearance

by S. M. Hutchens

In regard to Matthew Franck's two origin stories, I find it surprising that on so consequential a matter as the toleration of false teaching (for that is what we are discussing with regard to religious liberty), the apostolic deposit has given so little guidance that the Church has come to learn its own true mind on the subject, "not without pain and struggle," through its experiences in contemplation on the meaning of the imago Dei; through patristic allusion to the necessity that faith not be coerced; through the biblical record wherein our fathers, though chained in prisons dark, were still in heart and conscience free; and through heroes who laid the foundation for our religious liberty by resisting compulsion. . . . Continue ➡

Editorial

Be Kind to Children

The Anti-Family War & Its Lies

by Allan Carlson

What could possibly go wrong?" asks the Ruth Institute's Jennifer Roback Morse in a new commentary on sperm donation and surrogacy run amok. She describes women who paid for sperm from a "donor" who apparently had the credentials of a future Nobel Prize winner. Upon investigation, though, he proved to be a college dropout with a criminal record and a self-reported schizoaffective disorder. As one buyer ruefully concluded, "A hitchhiker on the side of the road would have been a far more responsible option for conceiving a child." Such is the consequence, Morse says, of transforming a child's other parent into a commercial transaction. . . . Continue ➡

Book Review

The Business of Faith

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin Kruse

reviewed by Graeme Hunter

Just a guess, but I suppose most of us Touchstonians take a dim view of religion's decline in importance since the 1950s. Politically conservative Christians are indignant at being ungently evicted from what Richard John Neuhaus taught us to call the "public square." Social conservatives take alarm at the degree to which Christian standards of public and private behavior have ceased to be respected. Because many of us are both politically and socially conservative, we are more than participants in these changes. We are partisans. We normally prefer partisan accounts of our situation to versions from the side that calls itself "progressive." . . . Continue ➡


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Touchstone May / June 2016
God's Word Uncut • Left-Right Populism versus American Elitism • In Praise of Wheaton's Biblical Witness

Editorial

The Master's Voice

Our Choice Is Obedience or Jesus as Anti-Christ

by Anthony Esolen

Thomas Jefferson, that freethinker with an odd and persistent strain of conservatism, fashioned his own New Testament by removing from it all of the accounts of Jesus' miracles. That was his piety at work, such as it was, as also when he attended services on his plantation, and the tears welled up in his eyes when he heard the old hymns he could no longer sing. For well over a hundred years, even Unitarians were "Christian" in this sense: they believed in the Fatherhood of God, and they believed that the moral teachings of Jesus Christ were the highest and noblest ever to be revealed to man. . . . Continue ➡

Commentary

Flailing Democracy

Left-Right Populism versus American Elitism

by James Hitchcock

The principal conservative argument against democracy is the claim that "the people"—ill-educated, vulnerable to mere emotion, susceptible to demagoguery—cannot be trusted. A well-governed state must depend on some kind of aristocracy to rise above such fatal weaknesses. The flaw in that classical argument was identified by Winston Churchill in his paradoxical comment that "democracy is the worst of all systems, except for the others.". . . Continue ➡

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Surgical Fantasy

On Biblical Compassion for Sex-Change Confusion

by Robert Hart

God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints. (1 Cor. 14:33) The invention of a new "civil right" is being forced upon us. I believe that if the great martyr of genuine civil rights could see what is being done in the name of his cause, he would be displeased—that is, if the things he actually believed in his lifetime are taken into account. . . . Continue ➡

Communiqué

It's Not Your Hijab

It's the Theology: In Praise of Wheaton College's Stand

by J. Daryl Charles

It was an issue that would not easily go away, and only intensified last winter. Aside from murder and mayhem in our streets and, of course, global warming, what galvanized CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, Time, NPR, USA Today, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Salon, and even news sources like Business Insider? Presidential primary madness? Gay "rights" and same-sex everything? Christian "homophobia" and conservative "hate crimes"? Gun control? Medicalizing marijuana? Perhaps pro-life "fanaticism"? Alas, it was none of these. What aroused the ire of all these outlets—as we've all surely heard by now—was the "scandal" (so Time) that engulfed the Evangelical college in suburban Chicago and leading member of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), Wheaton College. . . . Continue ➡


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Touchstone September / October 2015
Remembering Angka & the Idolatry of the Khmer Rouge 40 Years Later • The Dramatic Life, Faith & Films of Cecil B. DeMille • An Interview with Bishop Angaelos of the Coptic Orthodox Church

Touchstone July / August 2015
In Memoriam: Father Thomas Hopko • The Life of Richard John Neuhaus • On a Rabbi's Love for Mere Christianity

Touchstone May / June 2015
Describing Human Ends & Our Limitations Is Neither Futile Nor Unloving • Whittaker Chambers's Lonely War Against Godless Collectivism • The End of Comfortable Christianity

Touchstone March / April 2015
Echoes of Samaria: Finding Jesus & Neighbors in the Holy Land • Neo-Pagan Family Policies Doom Any Recovery • The Icon of Materialism

Touchstone January / February 2015
Five Reasons Why Freedom of Religion & Conscience Is in Peril • State Impositions & Church Acquiescence • The Unevangelized May Be Better & Worse than Savages


Explore back issues below, and at The Touchstone Archives

Touchstone November / December 2013
The Great Epics Are Theological & Mark the Hard Path to Beatitude • The Ministry of an Orthodox Army Chaplain in Southwest Asia Post-9/11 • The Cutting Edge of God's "Peace on Earth"

Touchstone September / October 2013
Reflections on the Sabbath in Time & Eternity • On the Holy Wisdom at the Roots of Philosophy • The Perils of Pragmatism in Christian Attitudes Toward the Liberal Arts

Touchstone July / August 2013
Hilton Kramer's Life of Cultural Discernment • A Christian Reflection on the Attractions & Shortcomings of Buddhism • An Ancient Greek Drama Awakened a Powerful New Longing in Its Audiences

Touchstone May / June 2013
On the Un-humanitarian Charity of Martin de Porres • The Legacy of the Mission of Cyril & Methodius 1,150 Years Later • Testing John Loftus's "Outsider Test for Faith" Shows Why There Are Billions of Christians Today


Touchstone March / April 2013
Believers Are No Longer Credible as Public Citizens • On Clarity, Mystery & Their Demands on Preachers & Hearers • Whittaker Chambers, Potemkin Villages & the Ongoing War


Touchstone January / February 2013
Manly Chastity, Hedonism & the Law of Non-contradiction • The Alternate & Alternative Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft & C. S. Lewis • On Abortion as a Matter of National Welfare



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Touchstone is a Christian journal, conservative in doctrine and eclectic in content, with editors and readers from each of the three great divisions of Christendom
—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox.

The mission of the journal and its publisher, The Fellowship of St. James, is to provide a place where Christians of various backgrounds can speak with one another on the basis of shared belief in the fundamental doctrines of the faith as revealed in Holy Scripture and summarized in the ancient creeds of the Church.


Get Religion

The Manhattan Declaration

Touchstone

Idols of the State

Secularists Want All Religion Out of the Public Square, Except Theirs

Salvo

Capital Losses

Nietzsche on Losing English Morality

Touchstone

Family Phases

The History of Family Strength in America May Reveal Good News

Salvo

Failed Operations

Medical Malpractice in an Age of Gender Denial Disorder

Touchstone

Dumb Sheep

On the Truth About a Slanderous Accusation

Salvo

Faith Removal

Militant Science & Apostle Krauss


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