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Last week a group of 106 faith leaders have collaborated on a letter they have signed and sent to the Democrat and Republican leadership of both houses of Congress. In this week’s Acton Commentary, Victor V. Claar explains that it hasn’t been aid that has lifted people out of poverty, but trade and access to markets. While many of the world’s politicians would like to take credit for cutting extreme global poverty in half in just 20 years, and the...

‘A habit of the heart’: Michael Novak on social justice

What is “social justice”? For some, it represents an ideal or a vision of a certain kind of society. For others, it’s a placeholder for particular government policies. For others, it’s a mere marker of ideology. For Michael Novak, the answer is “none of the above.” In his final book, Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is,published prior to his recent passing, Novak argues that social justice is a virtue — a “habit of the heart” that is “embodied...

How price controls can hurt the poor

Note: This is post #25 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. Suppose there is a mild winter on the West Coast and a harsh winter on the East Coast, says Alex Tabarrok, in this video by Marginal Revolution University. As a result of the weather, people on the East Coast will demand more home heating oil, bidding up the price. Under the price system, entrepreneurs will be incentivized to take oil from where it has lower value on...

Radio Free Acton: Scott Lincicome on how free trade benefits everyone

On this edition of Radio Free Acton, international trade attorney and Cato Institute Adjunct Scholar Scott e joins us to give us the real story on the benefits of international trade for the United States, and dispels some myths about the impacts of trade on U.S. industry and consumers. Often, free trade is portrayed as the enemy of American workers, stealing away jobs and creating massive trade deficits. e explains that while free trade does contribute to the process of...

Pope Francis and populism: How Christian leaders should respond to populism

In a recent article for the Federalist, Samuel Gregg discusses Pope Francis’s ments on populism. Pope Francis explicitly denounces populism saying: “Populism is evil and ends badly, as the past century shows.” However, Gregg points out that many populist sentiments could be attributed to this Pope: Nor are some of Francis’s principal supporters averse to invoking populist language when defending his program for the Catholic Church. Consider, for example, Archbishop Victor Fernández. The Argentine theologian is close enough to the...

Judge Gorsuch, the rule of law, and David Foster Wallace’s fish

Embed from Getty Images “We’re now like David Foster Wallace’s fish,” said Judge Neil Gorsuch earlier today in his nomination hearing. “We’re surrounded by the rule of law, it’s in the fabric of our lives.” Gorsuch made a similar claim in an article on “Law’s Irony” for theHarvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. The judge wondered “whether the law’s greatest irony might just be the hope obscured by the cynic’s shadow” and “whether cynicism about the law flourishes so...

Interview: Rev. Robert Sirico on Pope Francis and ‘Poverty Inc.’

In a recent interview on The Soul of Enterprise Radio Show, Acton President and Co-founder Rev. Robert Sirico spoke with Ron Baker and Ed Kless about the free economy and Acton’s unique role in upholding individual freedom and human dignity. In the first segment, Rev. Sirico discussed his book Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy as well as its recent translation into Italian. Additionally, Ed asked Rev. Sirico about his meeting with Pope Francis. Rev....

RELIGION & LIBERTY

Up from the Liberal Founding

During the 20th century, scholars of the American founding generally believed that it was liberal. Specifically, they saw the founding as rooted in the political thought of 17th-century English philosopher John Locke. In addition, they saw Locke as a primarily secular thinker, one who sought to isolate the role of religion from political considerations except when necessary to prop up the various assumptions he made for natural rights. These included a divine creator responsible for a rational world for...

Mar 24, 2026

Adam Smith and the Poor

Adam Smith did not seem to think that riches were requisite to happiness: “the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments). But he did not mend beggary. The beggar here is not any beggar, but Diogenes the Cynic, who asked of Alexander the Great only to step back so as not to cast a shadow upon Diogenes as he reclined alongside the highway....

Mar 24, 2026

Jesus and Class Warfare

Plenty of Marxists have turned to the New Testament and the origins of Christianity. Memorable examples include the works of F.D. Maurice and Zhu Weizhi’s Jesus the Proletarian. After criticizing how so many translations of the New Testament soften Jesus’ teachings regarding material possessions, greed, and wealth, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has gone so far to ask, “Are Christians supposed to be Communists?” In the Huffington Post, Dan Arel has even claimed that “Jesus was clearly a Marxist,...

Mar 24, 2026

How Dispensationalism Got Left Behind

Whether we like it or not, Americans, in one way or another, have all been indelibly shaped by dispensationalism. Such is the subtext of Daniel Hummel’s provocative telling of the rise and fall of dispensationalism in America. In a little less than 350 pages, Hummel traces how a relatively insignificant Irishman from the Plymouth Brethren, John Nelson Darby, prompted the proliferation of dispensational theology, especially its eschatology, or theology of the end times, among our ecclesiastical, cultural, and political...

Mar 24, 2026

Creating an Economy of Inclusion

The poor have been the main subject of concern in the whole tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. The Catholic Church talks often about a “preferential option for the poor.” In recent years, many of the Church’s social teaching documents have been particularly focused on the needs of the poorest people in the world’s poorest countries. The first major analysis of this topic could be said to have been in the papal encyclical Populorum Progressio, published in 1967 by Pope...

Mar 24, 2026

Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church

Religion & Liberty: Volume 33, Number 4 Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church by Christopher Parr • October 30, 2023 Portrait of Charles Spurgeon by Alexander Melville (1885) Charles Spurgeon was a young, zealous 15-year-old boy when he came to faith in Christ. A letter to his mother at the time captures the enthusiasm of his newfound Christian faith: “Oh, how I wish that I could do something for Christ.” God granted that wish, as Spurgeon would e “the prince of...

Mar 24, 2026

Mistaken About Poverty

Perhaps it is because America is the land of liberty and opportunity that debates about poverty are especially intense in the United States. Americans and would-be Americans have long been told that if they work hard enough and persevere they can achieve their dreams. For many people, the mere existence of poverty—absolute or relative—raises doubts about that promise and the American experiment more generally. Is it true that America suffers more poverty than any other advanced democracy in the...

Mar 24, 2026

Lord Jonathan Sacks: The West’s Rabbi

In October 1798, the president of the United States wrote to officers of the Massachusetts militia, acknowledging a limitation of federal rule. “We have no government,” John Adams wrote, “armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, and revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” The nation that Adams had helped to found would require the parts of the body...

Mar 24, 2026

C.S. Lewis and the Apocalypse of Gender

From very nearly the beginning, Christianity has wrestled with the question of the body. Heretics from gnostics to docetists devalued physical reality and the body, while orthodox Christianity insisted that the physical world offers us true signs pointing to God. This quarrel persists today, and one form it takes is the general confusion among Christians and non-Christians alike about gender. Is gender an abstracted idea? Is it reducible to biological characteristics? Is it a set of behaviors determined by...

Mar 24, 2026

Conversation Starters with … Anne Bradley

Anne Bradley is an Acton affiliate scholar, the vice president of academic affairs at The Fund for American Studies, and professor of economics at The Institute of World Politics. There’s much talk about mon good capitalism” these days, especially from the New Right. Is this long overdue, that a hyper-individualism be beaten back, or is it merely cover for increasing state control of the economy? Let me begin by saying that I hate “capitalism with adjectives” in general. This...

Mar 24, 2026