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In 60 years robots have only eliminated one industry

Embed from Getty Images As a journalist I’moften told that a trained monkey could do my job. While there’s probably some truth to that claim, I’m not all that concerned about a Planet of the Apes style takeover of my occupation. Trained monkeys don’t worry me; trained robots do. Or at least they did. For years I’ve heard my vocation is on the list ofjobs where robots are already replacing humans(along with shepherds, telemarketers, and bartenders). But is that really...

Explainer: What you should know about the Meals on Wheels controversy

Embed from Getty Images What’s the story? Last week, numerous media outlets falselyreported that the Trump administration proposed 2018 budget would eliminate charities like Meals on Wheels. The reports also claimedthat White House budget director Mick Mulvaney had said during a press conference that Meals on Wheels “doesn’t work.” (Representative headlines included Time’s “Trump’s Budget Would Kill a Program That Feeds 2.4 Million Senior Citizens” and Slate’s article: “Trump’s budget director says Meals on Wheels doesn’t work.” What is “Meals...

Explainer: What’s the difference between a free trade union and a customs union?

On Monday, Great Britain stood poised to enact Brexit with Her Majesty’s blessing. UK Prime Minister Theresa May announced that her government would send the letter officially triggering the UK’s exit from the European Union, in accordance with Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, on March 29 – more than nine months after the British people voted to extract themselves from the global governance institution. The notification will touch off a two-year-long period of negotiations that will determine the UK’s...

Explainer: What you should know about President Trump’s FY2018 budget

What is the president’s budget? Technically, it’s only a budgetrequest (and in this case, just a blueprint of a request). The budget request is aproposal telling Congress how much money the president believes should be spent on the various Cabinet-level federal functions, like agriculture, defense, education, etc. (The 62-page budget blueprintcan be found here.) Why does the president submit a budget to Congress? The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 requires that the President of the United States submit to Congress,...

Don’t let culture define religious liberty

When a fashion designer recently called for an industry boycott of Melania Trump due to her political beliefs, plenty of progressives called it brave and principled. Yet when Christian wedding photographers express their own disagreements or beliefs, acting on one’s conscience somehow es a “sticky issue.” That’s how one student describes it in a series of interviews at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In their discussions with students, the Alliance Defending Freedom found total consensus that creative professionals should have the...

What does natural law say about the power of judges in constitutional systems of government?

In a recent article for Public Discourse, Acton’s director of research, Samuel Gregg, speculates on the role of natural law — specifically New Natural Law Theory (NNLT) — in influencing, Neil Gorsuch’s exercise of judicial power in light of the constitution. Gregg asks two fundamental questions: No one can predict with certainty Gorsuch’s take on any question on which he might be called to deliberate if he receives Senate confirmation. But before too much ink is spilled speculating on whether...

What is the role of tradition in renewing Western civilization?

Does tradition harm progress? Acton’s director of research, Samuel Gregg, in a recent article for Library of Law and Liberty, describes “tradition” as the handing down of beliefs, cultural molds, and historical ways of thinking and living, but also as a means to promoting human flourishing in renewing civilization. He affirms that valuable wisdom that can be found in looking to past traditions, including traditions on either end of the political spectrum. In his search to define tradition and answer...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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 19, 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...

Mar 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 2026