Charles Murray
Political scientist, author, and F. A. Hayek Chair Emeritus in Cultural Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He wrote Taking Religion Seriously, a personal examination of his movement from agnosticism toward Christian belief.
Thomas Sowell’s Legacy Is Reasoning Under Limits
Roland Fryer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Charles Murray argue that Thomas Sowell’s influence rests less on a fixed set of conservative conclusions than on a discipline of reasoning: start with existing conditions, account for dispersed knowledge and incentives, and test claims against outcomes. They present that method as a challenge to policies driven by good intentions or idealized assumptions, while their debate over culture, genes and intervention shows that Sowell’s framework does not eliminate substantive disagreement.
Charles Murray’s Evidence-Based Case for Taking Religion Seriously
Charles Murray, the social scientist and author of Taking Religion Seriously, argues that a lifetime of casual agnosticism has become intellectually untenable. In a conversation with Peter Robinson, he says evidence and questions that materialism does not resolve—especially consciousness, near-death experiences, the historical grounding of the Gospels, and the Shroud of Turin—have led him to take God and Christianity seriously, though not to claim settled faith. Murray’s case is cumulative: religious belief, he argues, should be judged for its truth rather than defended merely for its civic utility.