Have you ever watched HBO’s Last Week Tonight? It’s a show where edian John Oliver reads a teleprompter explaining to Americans what is wrong with our country. It’s also a show where smug, self-satisfied progressives who miss John Stewart can be entertained while thinking they are watching “smart” content. In reality, Last Week Tonight is frequently one of the dumbest shows on cable (in the sense that watching it makes you less informed about the world). And yet it is...

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...

What just happened? The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the U.S. government’s consumer protection agency, has proposed new regulations that would affect payday lending in an attempt to end payday debt traps by requiring lenders to take steps to make sure consumers can repay their loans. What loans would the new regulation apply to? The proposed regulations would cover two categories of loans. The first is loans with a term of 45 days or less. The second is loans with...

Samuel Gregg, Director of Research at the Acton Institute and author of For God And Profit: How Banking and Finance Can Serve the Common Good, joins host Drew Mariani on Relevant Radio’s The Drew Mariani Show to discuss the recent failed referendum in Switzerland that would have provided a guaranteed basic e to all citizens, and how that vote reflects the limitations of social democracy. You can listen to the full interview via the audio player below. ...

We e guest writer Sam Webb to the PowerBlog with this review of If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Libertyby Eric Metaxas (Viking, 2016). Webb is an attorney in Houston and studies at Reformed Theological Seminary. He also serves as an Associate Research Fellow for the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Eric Metaxas’ golden triangle of freedom By Sam Webb Book Review: If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of...

Note: Please forgivethe self-promotion, but since my new book — the NIV Lifehacks Bible — is being released today, I thought I’d provide an excerpt from Genesis. Sold into slavery, Joseph is put in charge of Potiphar’s household. Potiphar “entrusted to his care everything he owned. From the time he put him in charge of his household and of all that he owned, the Lord blessed the household of the Egyptian because of Joseph” (Genesis 39:4-5). The word es from...

The Atlantic published an article by Dylan Walsh about the growing fight in many states for the right to legal counsel. This article focuses on the state of Louisiana, and looks specifically the Concordia Parish along the Mississippi river. Like many poor, rural areas of the country the Concordia Parish suffers from drug problems and the local courts see a high volume of cases involving illegal substances. The district’s chief public defender’s office handles around 3,300 cases per year, three...

Should you follow your passion, wherever it may take you? Should you do only what you love…or learn to love what you do? Mike Rowe, star of “Dirty Jobs” and the Acton Institute’s favorite blue-collar philosopher of work, shares the “dirty truth” about passion and vocation in PragerU’s mencement address. ...

There’s been a lot of discussion leading up to the planned Pan-Orthodox Council in Crete this month. As is typical of councils in the history of the Church, so far it’s a mess, and it hasn’t even happened yet. In what has been described as an act of self-marginalization by Bulgarian Orthodox scholar Smilen Markov, it looks like the Bulgarian Patriarchate has already backed out. Antioch has a laundry list of grievances. The OCA, which might not even technically be...

As persecution intensifies around the world, and as the incremental fight for religious liberty only begins here in America, Christians have an obligation to better understand the role of religious liberty and how it intersects with God’s design for political institutions. Unfortunately, as a recent video from John MacArthur demonstrates, the confusion is more widespreadthan I’d like to believe. “We can’t expect religious liberty to exist as some kind of divine right, as some gift from God,” he says. “…We...