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A Problem for Fighting Poverty: Fewer Than Half of American Adults Work Full-Time

The single best weapon against poverty in America is a full-time job. In 2014 the poverty rate among married couples was 6 percent; the poverty rate among married couples who both have full-time jobs was 0.001 percent. In 2014, the Census Bureau poverty rate for a family of two was $15,379 and for a family of five was $28,695. An individual working 40 hours a week for minimum wage earns $15,080 per year. If both couples work their earnings total...

No GMO for Fido?

As noted in the past posts, the tentacles of progressive environmentalism and fear-mongering against genetically modified organisms reach deep into the universe of religious shareholder activism. In fact, the connection between Green America and shareholder groups As You Sow and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility reads like a tin-eared version of “Dem Bones” wherein the connective tissue is mutual involvement with US SIF: The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment and Ceres. Knowledge of plicated interrelationships of these investment...

Audio: Acton Interview Roundup

We’ve had a burst of media activity this week; let’s round up some of Acton’s activity on the airwaves: Monday, February 15 Todd Huizinga, Acton’s Director of International Outreach, joined the FreedomWorks podcast to discuss his newly released bookThe New Totalitarian Temptation: Global Governance and the Crisis of Democracy in Europe. Tuesday, February 16 Kishore Jayabalan, Director of Istituto Acton in Rome, is a native of Flint, Michigan, and recently spent some time in his hometown. WJR Radio in Detroit...

Radio Free Acton: Remembering Antonin Scalia and a discussion on religious liberty with Ryan Anderson

On this edition of Radio Free Acton, we pay tribute to the late Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, and look to the future of religious liberty in the United States with Ryan Anderson of the Heritage Foundation. You can listen via the audio player below. After the jump: Justice Scalia’s 1997 address to the Acton Institute. ...

Audio: Rev. Robert A. Sirico On MLK The Pastor

Acton Institute President and Co-founder Rev. Robert A. Siricotook to the airwaves in Detroit this morning with guesthost Jason Vines on WJR Radio’s The Frank Beckmann Show to discuss the oft-overlooked fact that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was first and foremost a Christian pastor – theReverendDr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In many current day remembrances of King, his status as a Christian pastor seems to be downplayed or altogether ignored, instead portraying him as more of a generic “civil...

The limitations and opportunities of property

Please enjoy this guest post by Fr. Alejandro Crosthwaite; he reviews Wolfgang Grassl’s Property (Acton Institute, 2012) for the PowerBlog. Fr. Crosthwaite is dean of social sciences at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. Book Review: Property By Alejandro Crosthwaite The 2012 monograph entitled “Property” by Prof. Wolfgang Grassl, Full Professor of Business Administration and holder of the Dale and Ruth Michels Endowed Chair in Business at Saint Norbert’s College (De Pere, Wisconsin, USA), and published by...

The Executive’s Conscience: Where Work and Wage Meet

“The twin tracks of work and wage do not meet, and cannot be scientifically related. They are bridged by morality, not by mathematics.” -Lester DeKoster Low-wage workers continue to picket and protest around the country,demanding an increased minimum wage, improved access to benefits, and better working conditions. The political rhetoric hasfollowed accordingly, with Bernie Sanders calling for an increase in the minimum wage to $15 per hour, and Hillary Clinton arguing for $12 (due to differing magic potions, no doubt)....

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...

Feb 14, 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 14, 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 14, 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 14, 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 14, 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....

Feb 14, 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 14, 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 14, 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 14, 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 14, 2026