Free Republic

Dr. Rodney Stark has written nearly 40 books on a wide range of topics, including a number of recent books on the history of Christianity, monotheism, Christianity in China, and the roots of modernity...His most recent book is Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History (Templeton Press, 2016), which addresses ten prevalent myths about Church history... CWR: You begin the book by first noting your upbringing as an American Protestant and then discussing “distinguished bigots”. What is a “distinguished bigot”? ... Dr. Rodney Stark: By distinguished bigots I mean prominent scholars and intellectuals who clearly are antagonistic to the...

Why Heretics Hate Mary and We Should Love Her More Marian devotion is the cure for heresy and the healing of all heretics. We must turn to her for refuge from the heretical depravity now consuming the Church. Marian devotion is the destruction of error, the fount of humility, and a potent safeguard for orthodox faith.Mary Is the Destroyer of All Heresies In True Devotion to Mary, St. Louis de Montfort writes: The most infallible and indubitable sign by which we may distinguish a heretic, a man of bad doctrine, a reprobate, from one of the predestinate, is that the...

WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi likes to talk about the numbers to defend her go-slow approach to launching a formal impeachment process against President Donald Trump. "I think it's like 35 of them out of 238, maybe its 38 out of 238, have said they wanted to be outspoken on impeachment and many of them are reflecting their views as well as those of their constituents," Pelosi said at a Commonwealth Club of California Wednesday. "Yes, there are some, and the press makes more of a fuss about the 38 than the 200." But there are strong signs that the...

Another Columbus Day came and went...although not as such in Minneapolis, which voted this year to honor Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead, a time to reflect on the price American Indians paid for the greed and ruthlessness of my European ancestors. Yet it is ironic that Columbus should take the blame, for he was our first “multicultural” hero. An Italian Catholic who sailed for Spain, Columbus was one of a handful of celebrated Americans who did not fit neatly into the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant mold. The worst strike against Columbus was that he was a Roman Catholic. Catholics had a special...

Your highnesses, as Catholic Christians and Princes devoted to the Holy Christian faith and to the spreading of this faith, and as enemies of the Muslim sect and of all idolatries and heresies, ordered that I should go east, but not by land as is customary. I was to go by way of the west, whence until today we do not know with certainty that anyone has ever gone there. He sent me that I might bring the true faith to the Indians. ~ Christopher Columbus There are many reasons for defending what crucially needs to be defended, that except...

For those unfamiliar with the term, Marranos was the name given to Jews in medieval Spain, especially in the fifteenth century during the Spanish Inquisition, who secretly maintained their Judaism while living as Catholics in public. There is, of course, no Spanish Inquisition in America today – no one is being tortured into confessing what they really believe, and no one is being burned at the stake. But there are millions of Marrano-like Americans: Americans who hold conservative views – especially those who hold to conservative positions on social issues and those who voted for Donald Trump for president. Millions...

Congress must be urged to confirm these nominees for incoming President Trump's cabinet., Democrats and their commitment to a religious conviction they call climate change. It's time for the Inquisition to end For all the democrat grumbling about making sure there are no religious litmus tests for cabinet candidates, the committee hearings for Donald Trump’s nominees are rife with them. Candidates sitting before members of Congress are subject to a single mantra coming from democrats—“do you accept and believe that climate change is real and your job, first and foremost, is to combat this threat to the world?”

Some readers will remember the disputes during the last decade when the journalists were hauled before the farcical "Human Rights Commissions" of Canada and asked to explain why they had ever said anything that the state commissars did not agree with. Best of all is that the members of the Commission do not have to wait for anybody to complain to them before they act. The Commission is allowed to head out all by itself and search for things that are offensive. One must wonder whether it may just – wholly unforeseeably – be a government department which continuously...

Spanish Inquisition Question: What was the Church’s involvement with the Spanish Inquisition? It seems clothed in shadows. — Dorothy Perez, San Antonio Answer: This brief column cannot cover all the details and provide extensive references. However, the Spanish Inquisition was run by the secular government, not by the Church. The Church did have its own inquisition, distinct from the secular government of Spain. Most people preferred the Church’s inquisition and often appealed cases there since it was more clement and just by their estimation. The term “inquisition” simply refers to an inquiry into charges leveled against a person, usually of...

How Many Protestants Were Killed in the Inquisition? A friend asked me that question earlier this week. And so I thought it might be helpful to share a few thoughts, from a historical perspective. Opinions about how to answer the question vary widely. Some suggest that just a few thousand people were executed during the Inquisition, while others project that there were tens of millions of victims. So how can the estimates be so widely divergent? There seem to be several explanations: 1. First, the imprecise nature of the historical records means that contemporary historians are forced to extrapolate on...

Communities in New Mexico and southern Colorado have found irrefutable evidence to say they are descended from Jews. What next? The crypto-Jews of Spain have fascinated Jews for decades. But it was not always fascination – it was once more about the frustration, even resignation, that hundreds of thousands of Jews had been stolen in martyrdom or in forced conversions to Catholicism. In 1492, consolidating their gains following the conquest of Granada, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella enforced the Spanish Inquisition to offer Jews under their rule three infamous options: leave, convert or die. For those who converted, it was...

At the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama reminded attendees that violence rooted in religion isn’t exclusive to Islam, but has been carried out by Christians as well. ~snip~ “Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

Loving the new series of Game Of Thrones and can’t wait for the next episode? Go back and watch episode three again as there may be something that you missed… GOT linguist David Peterson - who created Dothraki and High and Low Valyrian for the HBO series – has revealed in an interview on makinggameofthrones.com that there is a hidden Easter egg. ‘One of the biggest is from episode three this season,’ he explained. ‘There’s a scene where the Meereenese rider is challenging Daenerys’ champion. He’s shouting and Nathalie Emmanuel [Missandei] is translating – but she’s not translating what he’s...

Say what you want about Republican gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie, but he knows a little something about the good people of New Jersey. In Texas, they may like candidates who strongly defend the right to bear arms. And in Wisconsin, a fine knowledge of dairy issues might secure you votes. But in New Jersey, it's all about referencing vintage British comedy. Why else would Christie's campaign have produced a spot lifting old Monty Python footage wholesale while attacking Senator Corzine's alleged plans to hike tolls? It's all about giving the people what they want. And in a rough and tumble...

For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It's time for us to take matters into our own hands.

As the U.S. government’s myriad intrusions radically transform our economy, few seem to notice the dangerous progress of the international Left’s assault on American sovereignty. Without firing a shot, transnational progressives are further along than the Soviet Union could ever have reasonably hoped to be, notwithstanding Lenin’s prescient understanding that we would willingly participate in our own demise. In the Left’s sights is the very concept of the American people’s right of self-defense. The New York Times reports that a Spanish court is considering filing human-rights charges, and issuing arrest warrants, against former attorney general Alberto Gonzales and five other...

Whenever someone points out the record of terror that Muslims are carrying out on a daily basis around the world, killing many thousands, one of the most stupid comments that is often made by liberals is that, “the Christian religion is just as bad”. If I ever had any respect for the viewpoint of a particular liberal, this kind of moral relevancy, equating the violence done by Christian fanatics several hundred years ago to the butchery of today’s Muslim fanatics, loses that respect immediately.

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 8, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - America is in a moral and culture tailspin leading to an escalating 'culture war', according to a majority of US citizens polled in a recent survey. The Culture and Media Institute released a special report March 7, entitled "The National Cultural Values Survey: America: a Nation in Moral and Spiritual Confusion," at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Responses to the survey revealed a country embattled on the issue of individualism versus moral responsibility, with the largest segment of the population swaying in a middle position between traditionalism and radical secularism. While...

Iraqi security forces killed 14 "terrorists" and arrested almost 200 suspects, the government said Monday, in a spectacular follow-up to their earlier capture of an alleged top-level Al Qaeda leader. Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki's office announced that over the previous 24 hours a large force of Iraqi troops and police swept through suspected insurgent strongholds in the Euphrates valley south of Baghdad. Taken with the arrest of Hamed Jumaa Al Saedi, an Iraqi alleged to be the Al Qaeda militant network's number two in the country, the arrests will be seen as a victory for Maliki's embattled government in...

Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. -Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782 Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. -Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782 History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will...