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Radio Free Acton: Jordan Ballor on Kuyper, Bonhoeffer and Thanksgiving; Upstream on Alternative Country Music

On this episode of Radio Free Acton, Bruce Edward Walker talks with Ray Nothstine, Opinion Editor of the the North State Journal and Editor at the Civitas Institute, on the alternative country music genre. Then, Caroline Roberts interviews Jordan Ballor, Senior Research Fellow and Director of Publishing at the Acton Institute, on the link between Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Abraham Kuyper, and Thanksgiving. Check out these additional resources on this week’s podcast topics: John Mellencamp official site Carlene Carter official site Lillie...

Explainer: What you should know about ‘net neutrality’

What just happened? Yesterday the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released a draft of the ‘Restoring Internet Freedom Order,’ a plan to roll back some of the ‘net neutrality’ regulations implemented by the Obama administration. What is net neutrality? Net neutrality (short for “network neutrality”) refers to both a design principle and laws that attempt to regulate and enforce that principle. Thenet neutrality principleis the idea that a public information network should aspire to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally....

5 facts about Black Friday

Today is the unofficial first day of the holiday shopping season. Here are five facts you should know about BlackFriday. 1. The term “BlackFriday” was coined by the Philadelphia Police Department’s traffic squad in the 1950s. According to Philadelphianewspaper reporter Joseph P. Barrett, “It was the day that Santa Claus took his chair in the department stores and every kid in the city wanted to see him. It was the first day of the Christmas shopping season.” Barrettt first used...

Transatlantic intelligence: Fast facts on the UK Budget 2017

As Americans made their final arrangements for Thanksgiving, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond unveiled the annual Budget on Wednesday. Here’s what you need to know. The Budget will spend a total of £809 billion ($1 trillion U.S.), adding £41 billion to the national debt. It makes two policy changes to address the housing shortage, the most important issue to young Brits. Hammond pledged £15.3 billion to build 300,000 homes a year – but none on the so-called greenbelt,...

Wealth creation within global cultural perspectives

Economic development is a key aspect of culture—and at the same time, a challenge to cultural norms. How should Christians reconcile such tension? What is culture’s impact upon the biblical mandate to create wealth for holistic transformation? Earlier this year two evangelical groups, theLausanne MovementandBAM Global, released apaper exploringwealth creation within global cultural perspectives to address these and other questions about culture and wealth creation. In particular, the paper examines the ‘anthropological temptation’: the temptation to idolize culture, and to...

How gratitude empowers the free society

Despite being surrounded by unprecedented levels of opportunity and prosperity, we live in a profoundly anxious age, fearful of economic disruption even as we resist the pull to idolize status, wealth, fortability. When observing the vices that persist amid economic freedom and abundance, many are quick to proclaim, “The market is not enough!” And they’re right. We also need gratitude. “We should bow in gratitude to God for His many favors,” said President Calvin Coolidge in his 1925 Thanksgiving Proclamation,...

The other capitalist Thanksgiving story: How trade saved the Pilgrims, and the U.S.

By now the Pilgrims’ disastrous experiment with collectivism in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is well-known, in free market circles if not among the young. The story has been printed and popularized – Rush Limbaugh even recites it annually on his radio program. However, trade merce played another, lesser-known role in the first Thanksgiving – and America’s founding, history, and self-definition. Public schools still teach the familiar history of Thanksgiving: that American Indians taught starving Pilgrims useful practices like fertilization. A grateful Governor...

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...

May 1, 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....

May 1, 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,...

May 1, 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...

May 1, 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...

May 1, 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...

May 1, 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...

May 1, 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...

May 1, 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...

May 1, 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...

May 1, 2026