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Many prisoners released over COVID-19 have reoffended. Here are 3 lessons we can learn from that.

On Friday at The Stream, I wrote about the policy of releasing prisoners from penitentiaries in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Perhaps hundreds of those who have been released mitted new pounding the tragedies the American people must suffer during this global pandemic. In New York state alone, 50 freed inmates found themselves back in jail within three weeks. Last week at the Cato Institute, Clark Neily advocated broader release of prisoners and a fundamental rethinking of...

The persecution of Jimmy Lai

It’s no secret that China isn’t exactly flavor of the month throughout the world right now. Before the court of global opinion, the reputation of the Chinese regime is about as low as it can go. That, however, does not appear to be deterring China’s Communist leadership from continuing to behave in ways which have rightfully drawn upon it the odium of the world. There are of course plenty of people in China who disapprove of their government’s actions. The...

Don’t seize Harvard’s endowment. Cut off federal funding.

William F. Buckley Jr. frequently told the joke about the doctor who asked his patient what he planned to do now that he had only a few months left to live. The patient said he would join the Communist Party: “Better one of them should go than one of us.” Conservatives often have the right diagnosis of the problem but the wrong solution. One such case is the proposal for the federal government to tax, or seize, the endowments of...

Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer and the limits of science

There have been many responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in all spheres of life from businesses, educational institutions, churches, and within close intimate human relationships. Most of these responses have arisen spontaneously as people’s duties to protect themselves and others, both individuals munities, have e plain to them. Government at all levels has also acted, imposing a series of sometimes necessary but often arbitrary and capricious restrictions on economic and social life. Protests from citizens concerned with the economic and...

Acton Line podcast: Rev. Robert Sirico on the church’s response to COVID-19

As the United States continues to wrestle with the fallout of COVID-19, many people are falling back on their faith and the church for peace. Many churches have decided to hold services online, and local governments have also stepped in and put parameters around church attendance to help mitigate the spread of the virus. Some actions taken by local governments have been appropriate, but some others leave us wondering if the government has overstepped. How can we tell the difference...

The great price of America’s great lockdown

One reason why economists are viewed as modern-day Cassandras is that they tell us many things we don’t want to hear. Economics points relentlessly to the costs and benefits associated with particular decisions about alternative uses of scarce resources. Not everyone likes to be reminded of the trade-offs and unintended consequences that flow from different choices. Some of those side-effects touch upon political questions. How much liberty are we prepared to exchange for some assurance of security? Are we willing...

Rev. Sirico: The dangers of accepting government money, even in a crisis

Rev. Robert Sirico, president and co-founder of the Acton Institute, reflects on the ways government programs and government money can be corrupting, even when those programs may seem necessary during a crisis. Rev. Sirico shares why the Acton Institute will not be applying for the Paycheck Protection Program and how other businesses and non-profits should weigh the benefits and risks of government relief programs like this. ...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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