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In the Q&A part of a session I led at last month’s Acton University on Abraham Kuyper and Leo XIII(based on this recent volume), I was asked about specific areas where the two figures have something concrete to contribute today. One theme I highlighted was to their shared emphasis on the centrality and dignity of human work. Today there is a great deal of anxiety over the future of work in an age of increasing globalization, automation, and structural changes...

Would school choice help conservatives recover from the ‘cultural massacre’?

The Spectator Australia published an article Monday claiming that the “culture war” between conservative and liberal values is, in reality, a “cultural massacre.” The carnage is evident in the numbers, specifically in education: in the United Kingdom, conservatives make up only seven percent of primary school teachers and only eight percent of secondary school teachers. In the United States, conservatives often focus on the lack of intellectual diversity on university campuses. They are not wrong to worry. In September, the...

How ordinary economic thinking helps constrain political chaos

In an age where chaos and cronyism seem to be the defining characteristics of our politics, and where the political system is increasingly decried as being “rigged” by populists from both the left and right, the time seems ripe for a renewed focus on political constraints. When such concerns arise, we are quick to point back to the U.S. Constitution, and rightly so. Yet economist Peter Boettke sees another guide that can also offer some value. For Boetkke, our politics...

Saving Charlie Gard

“The case of 11-month-old Charlie Gard continues to garner international attention and pleas for his life from Donald Trump and Pope Francis,” says Anne Rathbone Bradley in this week’s Acton Commentary. “Cases like Charlie’s, while exceptional and rare, are important because they establish precedents regarding the relationship between the individual and the state.” When we think about it in this way, Great Ormond Street Hospital – which has been the target of much criticism – is actually almost an incidental...

Reading ‘Democracy in America’ (Part 2): What did Tocqueville mean by ‘equality of condition’?

This is the second part in a series on how to read Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” Read Part 1 and follow the entire series here. As we begin our study of Democracy in America, we bear in mind that the work’s distinguished author, Alexis de Tocqueville, blessed us with a clear, concise introduction to the two-volume work. The introduction is the most important chapter of the work in terms ing to grips with Tocqueville’s overall argument and purpose...

Is it cleaner to trade pollution?

Note: This is post #40 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. In an effort to reduce pollution, the government tried two policy prescriptions under the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, notes Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution University. The mand and control—mandated that each power plant lower its pollution by a determined amount. However, different firms face different cost curves and, because information is dispersed, policymakers don’t always know those costs. The second policy prescription—tradable pollution permits—empowered firms...

Macron’s African statement ignores human ingenuity

A French media outlet has captured an otherwise ment from French President Emmanuel Macron that Africa is overpopulated. When asked about a possible “Marshall Plan for Africa,” Macron listed among the continent’s current problems the need for “demographic transition,” lamenting the fact that some African “countries still haveseven to eight children per woman.” His concerns seem particularly worth examining today on World Population Day. During a July 8 press conference about the G20 summit, Macron began by naming truly concerning...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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....

Feb 15, 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...

Feb 15, 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,...

Feb 15, 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...

Feb 15, 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...

Feb 15, 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...

Feb 15, 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...

Feb 15, 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...

Feb 15, 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...

Feb 15, 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...

Feb 15, 2026