Emil Brunner

"This inversion of the structure of the State which, instead of being built up from below, is organized from above, is the one great iniquity of our time, the iniquity which overshadows all others, and generates them of itself. The order of creation is turned upside down; what should be last is first, the expedient, the subsidiary, has become the main thing.

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Frank S. Meyer

With this simple statement from his 1962 book, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo, Frank S. Meyer defined the goal of postwar conservatism: to create a society in which men are free to pursue virtue but not enforce virtue at the point of a gun.

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Orestes Brownson

Orestes Brownson (1803-76) is not, at first sight, a philosopher of liberty but, rather, one who is concerned with ordered liberty itself ordained towards a higher good. He was, to put it paradoxically, more attentive to the many ways in which freedom goes wrong than in the ways in which it goes right.

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J. Howard Pew

Born in Pennsylvania to a devout Presbyterian family, J. Howard Pew was taught at an early age the value of freedom. His father, Joseph Newton Pew, with Edward O. Emerson, established in 1876 what eventually became known as Sun Oil Company.

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John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman, perhaps the most prominent churchman of nineteenth-century England, was born in the City of London to a Huguenot mother and a father of religiously broadminded sentiments.

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John Bright

Son of an English self-made textile manufacturer, John Bright entered his father's business after leaving school. Upon the death of his wife in 1841, Bright and his colleague Richard Cobden began the Anti-Corn Law campaign (1838-1846) which ultimately succeeded in lowering import tariffs, producing freer trade.

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C.S. Lewis

One of the greatest Christian thinkers of the twentieth century, C.S. Lewis was a respected scholar and teacher at Oxford University for 29 years and then a professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University to the end of his career. An atheist throughout his early life, he adopted theism in 1929 and converted to Christianity in 1931.

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Booker T. Washington

Washington was in many ways a distinguished personality, provincially wise, astute, and certainly diplomatic. A tireless educator, masterful orator and advocate of black self-improvement, Booker T. Washington's ideas were as controversial in his day as they are in ours.

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William Wilberforce

Born in the great northern seaport of Hull in 1759, William Wilberforce would one day lead the cause for the abolition of slavery in the United Kingdom.

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Anne Robert Jacques Turgot

It was 1774, and decades of expensive and ill-advised government ventures left the regime of Louis the XVI fiscally overstretched and teetering, once again, on the edge of bankruptcy. Thus was the situation when Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, the baron de l' Aulne, was appointed France's Minister of Finance.

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St. Bernardino of Siena

St. Bernardino of Siena, the “Apostle of Italy,” was a missionary, reformer, and scholastic economist. He was born of the noble family of Albizeschi in the Tuscan town of Massa Marittima. After taking care of the sick during a great plague in Siena in 1400, he entered the Franciscan order.

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J. Gresham Machen

One of the most articulate defenders of orthodox Christian theology against the liberalizing and rationalizing trends of the early twentieth century was J. Gresham Machen. Influenced by his Reformed Protestant background, Machen was trained as a pastor at Princeton Seminary (once the center of conservative Calvinism), and authored numerous religious texts.

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