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Radio Free Acton: Samuel Gregg on the life and impact of Michael Novak

On this edition of Radio Free Acton, we speak with Acton Institute Director of Research Samuel Gregg about the life and impact of Michael Novak, who passed away on February 17, 2017. Novak, a Roman Catholic theologian, philosopher, and author, was a powerful defender of human liberty and made vital contributions to our understanding of the morality of the market economy. Novak’s influence was an important factor in Rev. Robert A. Sirico’s effort to found the Acton Institute, and he...

Why people prefer government to markets

People do not love markets,” says Pascal Boyer of the International Cognition & Culture Institute, “there is a lot of evidence for that.” Sadly, Boyer is right and I suspect he’s right about the cause too: People do not like markets because people seem not to understand much about market economics. We don’t fully understand this antipathy, Boyer notes, because there hasn’t been much research on folk-economics, a study of “what makes people’s economic modules tick.” But I think Boyer...

Equally the gift of nature: the link between religious and economic liberties

In this week’s mentary, Acton research fellow, Kevin E. Schmiesing, affirms the necessity of standing up for economic and religious liberty stating these are two liberties extremely necessary for limiting government and maintaining successful opposition to totalitarianism. A …reason for the link between [religious and economic] liberties is that both reflect at base mitment to the limits of state power. Where, for example, a right to seek employment in whatever field an individual chooses is recognized, it is implicitly held...

The Christian patristic roots of religious liberty

One of the aspects that I left out of my article yesterdayon the fifth European Catholic-Orthodox Forum statement worth noting isits declaration on the origins of religious liberty. Freedom of conscience and the right to choose one’s own religion – two human rights extolled by the modern, secular EU – grew out of the Christian conception of human dignity. Specifically, they originate with second-century Christian writers, according to the fifth European Catholic-Orthodox Forum’s statement: We have endeavoured to recall the...

Ignoring faith and human dignity leaves Europe ‘adrift’: Joint Catholic-Orthodox statement

Leaders from the world’s two largest churches say that Christians in the West are facing “unprecedented” hurdles to living out their vocation according to their conscience. A statement from Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians says that as traditional Western culture – liberally influenced by Christianity – is replaced with relativistic secularism and radicalized Islam, Christians are facing new barriers to entering whole sectors of the workplace, as well as other forms of hard and soft persecution. A misunderstanding of...

A guaranteed income isn’t the solution to widespread unemployment

In a recent article for Public Discourse, Dylan Pahman, a research fellow at Acton, examines the ineffectiveness of trade protectionism and universal e guarantees. Pahman argues that regulating wages and restraining free trade will do more harm then good to the success of business. Pahman begins his critique by responding to Trump’s stance on protectionism. During his inaugural address, Trump said: One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon...

Movie review: ‘The Founder,’ Schumpeter, and the entrepreneur

Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty made a mistake of historic proportions at the 2017 Academy Awards, when they mistakenly awarded the Oscar for “Best Picture” to La La Land. They should have awarded it to The Founder, the new biopic about McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc which, alas,did not garner any Oscar nominations. I saw The Founder on February 8. By happenstance, that is the birthday of Joseph A. Schumpeter, the Viennese economist whose key contribution to his discipline was his...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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 11, 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 11, 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 11, 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 11, 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 11, 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 11, 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 11, 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 11, 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 11, 2026

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 11, 2026