Is 2021 the year of the end of freedom in Europe? Päivi Räsänen, a former Finnish minister and current member of the European Parliament, has been accused of inciting hatred against homosexuals by quoting from the Bible. He faces two years behind bars. She responded to the accusation with the words: “The first Christians did not give up faith even in the pits with lions, why then should I renounce faith in the courtroom? How to react to this new situation in personal, cultural and political life?
The MP of Finnish parliament from 1995 and former Finnish minister of the interior (2011-2015). As faithful conservative member of evangelical church, she has criticized strengthening agenda of rights of sexual minorities and defended marriage between man and woman in her homeland, which led to her accusation of alleged hatred against homosexuals.
Marián Čaučík was an activist in the underground church. He is a co-founder of the Movement of Christian Communities of Children called eRko and he was the director of the Dobrá novina charity program. He has been actively involved in development aid in Africa. He is active in the Christian Democratic Party(KDH), for which he ran in the European Parliament and parliamentary elections in Slovakia. In 2018, he received the Pribin Cross II. degree for merits for the social development of the Slovak Republic.
Rod Dreher is an author and journalist whose best-selling books have been translated into 12 languages. He is a leading commentator on the relationship between Christianity and public life. He is a senior editor at The American Conservative, where he writes a popular blog about religion, culture, and politics, and he publishes often in other journals. In 2017, his best-selling book "The Benedict Option" was described by The New York Times as "the most important religious book of the decade." In 2019, his book "Live Not By Lies," a warning about what he regards as the coming soft totalitarianism, became another bestseller in the United States. He dedicated the book to the memory of Father Tomislav Kolakovic, the founder of the Slovak underground church. He is an Orthodox Christian who lives with his wife and children in Louisiana.
István is a political scientist and an international relations expert and the director of the Danube Institute, which spreads conservative ideas in Europe. He graduated at Pázmány Péter Catholic University and at the University of Edinburgh, currently working on his PhD at his alma mater. He previously worked as a Research Fellow and then a Senior Research Fellow responsible for foreign policy research at the Századvég Foundation, later he joined the Prime Minister’s Office of Hungary as a political advisor.
Ján Tomaštík is a doctoral student of Political Science at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, where he specializes in political philosophy and natural law thinking. Between his Bachelor and Master degrees, Ján spent a year studying at the Collegium of Anton Neuwirth. He concluded his Master's studies focused on democratization and human rights with a thesis on the relationship between Catholic political thought and liberal democracy after WW2. Ján spent 12 months as a Veritas Scholar at ADF International, an international advocacy organization whose mission is to protect fundamental human rights, including right to life, freedom of religion and expression, and marriage and family. Since then, he has worked in state service.
