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Wisconsin Democrats want to hear your confession

In Wisconsin, Democratic state legislators are proposing the Clergy Mandatory Reporter Act (CMRA), which would require “that members of the clergy report any instances of child abuse, including sexual abuse, ending the loophole of unjust cover-ups and misreporting currently occurring in our state.” “As an Orthodox priest,”says Rev. Gregory Jensen in this week’s Acton Commentary. “I cannot accept any attempt by the state to re-define for its own purposes the nature of the sacrament of confession.” Catholic League presidentBill Donohuesaid...

The most dangerous countries to be a Christian

Today is the first observance of the “International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief.” The observance, as Alliance Defending Freedom notes, is considered by human rights experts to be an important step towards the prevention of religious persecution in the future. In May the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution A/RES/73/296 to add this observance and to strongly condemn continuing violence and acts of terrorism targeting individuals, including persons belonging to religious minorities,...

Italy’s usual political turmoil

I appeared on EWTN News Nightly yesterday to talk about the collapse of the Italian government. Such turmoil is nothing new in Italy. Discontent with the political class is the main reason there was a populist coalition government in the first place. What made this government unusual was bination of right- and left-wing populists together. Its failure means that the populist appeal to e ideology is not yet mature enough to rule. Matteo Salvini and the League were initially the...

Is wealth immoral? A Jewish view

At a public event earlier this year, when Ta-Nahisi Coates asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez if any “moral world” ever “allows for billionaires,” she replied simply, No.” Earlier this month, Adam Roberts asked at Vox, “Is wealth immoral?” while, some time earlier, journalist A.Q. Roberts wrote inCurrent Affairs that “It’s Basically Just Immoral to be Rich.” Is wealth itself unethical? “On the contrary,” writes Ismar Schorsch, chancellor emeritus of Jewish Theological Seminary, “the Torah highlights [wealth] as a sign of God’s favor.”...

Thanks, China, for your ‘foreign aid’ to America’s low income workers

Several years ago economist Bryan Caplan provided themost succinct and helpful statement about how we should think about free trade: “We’d be better off if other countries gave us stuff for free. Isn’t ‘really cheap’ the next-best thing?” As with any simplification, critics could find many reasons to grumble about what that leaves unstated (e.g., trade leads to offshoring of jobs). But it highlights an important point about why free trade matters. Free trade is about as close to a...

Acton Line podcast: What is cronyism? Samuel Gregg on reason and faith in Western civilization

Cronyism is everywhere, affecting industries, entrepreneurs and customers and distorting the market through political advantage. So what is cronyism and how does promise genuine capitalism? Anne Rathbone Bradley, the current academic director at The Fund for American Studies, as well as the vice president of Economic Initiatives at the Institute for Faith, Work and es onto the show to explain how cronyism affects the market and how bat it. Afterwards, Acton’s director of research, Samuel Gregg, joins the show to...

The nation in arms: Drucker on government’s ultimate tool for social control

This is the third in a series of essays on Peter Drucker’s early works. As I explained in an earlier post, Drucker recognized that fascists were able to take advantage of the dissatisfaction that many experience in a society dominated by money. They substitute party organization as a parallel social existence and then elevate it into a superior status-granting mechanism. In this way, the party exploits anger over inequality. I also discussed Drucker’s sense that the church should have been...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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,...

May 1, 2024

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...

May 1, 2024

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...

May 1, 2024

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...

May 1, 2024

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...

May 1, 2024

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....

May 1, 2024

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...

May 1, 2024

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...

May 1, 2024

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...

May 1, 2024

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...

May 1, 2024