Religion | Religious News - www.mreligion.com

More groups are beginning to notice the hypocrisy of nuns advocating for progressive causes, including and especially their stumping for campaign finance disclosure. Over at Juicy Ecumenism, the blog published by the Institute of Religion & Democracy, guest writer T.J. Whittle echoes what loyal PowerBlog readers will recognize as a familiar theme. Namely, the nuns are working in league with leftist organizations interested only in stifling their opponents’ political speech. In his essay, “Nuns in Glass Buses,” Whittle, a research...

No Midterm Elections Could Save Europe

Things really aren’t looking good across the pond. Acton’s Director of Research, Samuel Gregg, has written quite a bit about the decline in Europe. His latest ‘Meanwhile, Europe is (Still) Burning’ in the American Spectator, discusses the inability or unwillingness of European governments to respond to economic trouble. Two of the world’s large economies, France and Italy, are examples of this. In France, workforce unemployment is 11 percent, the government has engaged in possibly illegal activity by hiding the fact...

Giving God What We Already Have

“What would happen if instead of focusing on what we don’t have, we consider what God has already given us — our talents, our dreams, our motivations — and offer them back to Him as an act of worship?” In a new video from HOPE International, we’re challenged to counter our tendencies to approach God through an attitude of lack and self-doubt (“if only I had x I would do y”), trusting instead that God has already given us exactly...

Unemployment as Economic-Spiritual Indicator — October 2014 Report

Series Note: Jobs are one of the most important aspects of a morally functioning economy. They help us serve the needs of our neighbors and lead to human flourishing both for the individual and munities. Conversely, not having a job can adversely affect spiritual and psychological well-being of individuals and families. Because unemployment is a spiritual problem, Christians in America need to understand and be aware of the monthly data on employment. Each month highlight the latest numbers we need...

Buying Babies And The Industrialization Of Parenthood

“How am I supposed to get a baby?” There are many people who cannot get pregnant and have a child. Some are infertile. Some are single and have no one that wishes to parent with them. Gay couples cannot naturally have children. So how are these folks supposed to get the baby that they want? This is the question Alana S. Newman was faced with while speaking at the Bonds that Matter conference. It’s not the first time Newman has...

United Nations Charged With Birth Control Subterfuge In Kenya

People are not lab rats. Regardless of who they are, where they live, how much money they have or don’t have, people are not to be used for scientific experimentation without their permission. The shameful Tuskegee experiment, the horrific medical experimentation carried out by the Nazis, and the modern eugenics movement all share an underlying principle: there are some people that aren’t quite people at all – not the “kind” we want anyway. In Kenya, the United Nations has been...

Why Aren’t Sexual Assaults on College Campuses Treated Like Actual Crimes?

The Education Department has concluded an investigation at Princeton University, and determined that the school violated the Title IX gender equity law in its handling of sexual assault cases. What did Princeton do wrong? Part of the problem, says the Education Department, is that the university violated the rights of rape survivors by using a standard of proof for sexual assault cases higher than the federally mended standard, which requires a “preponderance of evidence” for responsibility. At this point you...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Apr 8, 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...

Apr 8, 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...

Apr 8, 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...

Apr 8, 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...

Apr 8, 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....

Apr 8, 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...

Apr 8, 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...

Apr 8, 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...

Apr 8, 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,...

Apr 8, 2026