By: Bernard Stanford

If you were at all active on social media or read the news last month, you probably saw a report from Oxfam that made the rounds, claiming that the eight richest people have as much wealth as the bottom half of everybody on the planet. In fact, Oxfam releases a report in a similar vein every year, all timed to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Every year, the report is given wide publicity by media such as The New York Times and The Guardian. And every year, it’s just as wrong.

By: Julie Slama

As President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe were meeting in Mar-a-Lago in early February, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made headlines for a successful missile launch into the Sea of Japan, paired with claims that the country could already have the technology necessary to conduct a strike against the United States. North Korea’s destabilizing actions since the beginning of the year have raised serious concerns among national security experts, but seemed to be of only passing interest to those in attendance at the 2017 World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates. The Communist regime’s posturing suggests that an attack on American soil is possible, which could bring the several countries into conflict.

By: Julie Slama

This February, I had the opportunity to attend the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in Bogota, Colombia. The summit, which drew 26 Nobel Peace Prize recipients and thousands of participants covering six continents, discussed hurdles to peace present in the world today. American presidents have a history of receiving the prize, but it seems that our current president is viewed by the laureates, and the global community as a whole, as an impediment to peace.

The following essay drew inspiration from the Buckley Program’s dinner seminar and discussion on religious freedom with Mary Eberstadt on 1.25.17

By: Noah Daponte-Smith

The past eight years have been something of a disaster for religious conservatives. President Obama may have campaigned in 2008 on an anti-gay marriage platform, but by the time he left office last week, gay marriage had become the law of the land, the Affordable Care Act was forcing ecclesiastical orders to provide contraception and abortion to their employees, and the weight of governmental authority and public acrimony were pressuring bakers who still maintained traditionalist conceptions of marriage into providing cakes for gay weddings in violation of their consciences.

It comes as no surprise, then, that so many traditionalist Christians — those who do not belong to those churches that have largely succumbed to the tide of the modern secularist revolution — believe their world is facing an existential threat. It is this threat which Mary Eberstadt’s new book, It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies, seeks to bring to light, and which Eberstadt discussed with the student fellows of the Buckley Program on her recent visit to New Haven. Eberstadt’s book, short but powerful, is a testament to the weight of discrimination and social animus faced by traditionalist religious conservatives in an increasingly secular world. That discrimination, though often scoffed at by many liberals, is real, and surely one of the issues most pressing on the Christian mind in the summer and fall of 2016. The question is one of almost existential importance: At stake seems to be the matter of whether one can truly, freely be a Christian in today’s America.