Last year Gordon College, a Christian school just north of Boston, found itself in the crosshairs of the intolerant “social justice” Left merely because of its Evangelical faith. This week, Gordon prevailed against a dangerous threat and secured an important victory for religious liberty and academic freedom.

The ostensible pretext for the Left’s two minutes hate against Gordon was its president’s decision to sign, in his personal capacity, a letter asking president Obama to include a narrow religious-liberties exemption in his executive order banning sexual-orientation discrimination by federal contractors. The requested exemption was in fact narrower than one that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren had supported in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) a mere eight months before.

In other words, Gordon president Michael Lindsay was asking for accommodations slightly to the left of Senator Warren. But, as I noted in a National Review print article about the controversy, the arc of leftist social history moves quickly, and it bends toward intolerance. The November 2013 version of Senator Warren was now the definition of bigotry. It was 2014 and time to reject the sins of the past.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a self-identified socialist who’s perhaps the most left-leaning member of Congress, is expected to announce this week that he will seek the Democratic nomination for president. Sanders, 74, was born to Jewish parents and identifies as Jewish — though culturally, not religiously. Most political observers call him a super long shot for the nomination, but he will appeal to Democratic voters who admire his constant exhortations against the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Sanders has called for free higher education for all Americans, publicly funded elections and a $1 trillion program to restore the nation’s bridges and roads.

Sanders has one grown son, Levi, from his first marriage, and three grown stepchildren from his current marriage to Jane O’Meara Sanders, the former president of Vermont’s Burlington College. Raised Catholic, she said in a 1996 interview with the Burlington Free Press that she still practices Catholicism “in my own way.”

David Brooks wants you to be in a Bible study. You’ll get more out of it than you would at a dinner party, he says, if you find places where you can talk about pain and suffering. In preparation for his new book, “The Road to Character,” the New York Times columnist read many religious authors, including early Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo. “I now consider Augustine the smartest human being I’ve ever encountered in any form,” he says. Brooks, who is Jewish, has admiration for many Christian authors, but he also explains how he struggles with theological tensions with Christianity. This interview has been edited for length.

Can you talk about the state of your faith?

I’m still not talking about it. I do think it is personal. The book has some self revelatory things. But I try to keep a limit on all aspects of my life. I only go so deep with no specifics because the book is a defense of privacy and reticence. I want to talk in general about my life but not in detail. Some things are so delicate in everybody’s lives, they should only be shared with people who you trust. You do some violence to private emotion and private thought when you reduce it to simplicities of public conversation. I was asked on NPR, and I said everything is so green and fresh, it’s particularly unsettled and particularly fragile.