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7 reasons you should care about economic liberty

Christians who support the free market often find ourselves accused of worshiping, in the words of the New York Times, “a false idol” – a thought, shared by a disconcerting number of evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics alike. Yet irrefutable proof to the contrary issued from two very different venues and literally echoed all over the world this week. From the unassuming and scholarly halls of Canada’s Fraser Institute on Tuesday came its annual report detailing the state of global...

Explainer: What you should know about the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)

What just happened? Shortly before midnight on September 30, the United States and Canada agreed to a deal to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA). The new trilateral trade agreement is called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). When does it take effect? Before it can take effect, leaders from each of the three countries must sign it and get it approved by their nation’s legislatures. Because this process is expected to take several months, the main provisions of USMCA...

Explainer: The Supreme Court confirmation process

Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee is hearing allegations against Supreme Court nomineeJudge Brett Kavanaugh. This is likely to be the final stage in the process the will either approve or disapprove his appointment to the Court. Here is what you should know about the confirmation process. What does Supreme Court confirmation entail? According to the U.S. Constitution, federal judges—including Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court—are appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate. Although the...

Business Matters: Meaningful Work in the Modern Age

Like everything else in 2018, business has an emotional and often polarizing effect in our society. There are, of course, legitimate stories of business behaving badly. One high-profile example: the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica debacle that thrust the social media giant into the spotlight with a data breach affecting 87 million users. Cronyism remains alive and well, as witnessed by the Foxconn deal in Wisconsin. Cities are clamoring to win the coveted second headquarters location for Amazon, offering corporate welfare...

C.S. Lewis on the necessity of chivalry

There are few concepts today more dismissed—and yet more necessary—than chivalry. During the Middle Ages chivalry was a moral system bined a warrior ethos, knightly piety, and courtly manners. As C.S. Lewis writes in “The Necessity of Chivalry“—my favorite essay of his—the medieval ideal brought together fierceness and meekness, “two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another.” “It brought them together for that very reason,” says Lewis. “It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior...

Walmart removes hammer-and-sickle merchandise

After backlash from across the globe, Walmart has stopped selling items bearing the hammer-and-sickle insignia of the Soviet Union. This followed strongly worded letters from Baltic leaders and a U.S. educational effort largely spearheaded by Mari-Ann Kelam through the Acton Institute. The controversy burst into public consciousness when Kelam wrote an Acton Commentary titled, “Walmart’s T-shirt homage to mass murder,” published on September 5. A number of news outlets picked up the story, both in print and on radio. Lithuania’s...

The failure of ‘good intentions’ in America’s entitlement state

Amid the flurry of anti-poverty activism gone wrong, we are routinely reminded thatgood intentions aren’t enough. Although the motives of our hearts often serve as fuel for positive transformation, our corresponding efforts also require reason, wisdom, discernment, and a healthy recognition of real-world ripple effects and constraints. In public policy, we see an unfortunate mix of good intentions and unintended harm across a range of issues, from disaster relief to foreign aid to healthcare policy and beyond. At present, however,...

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...

Apr 27, 2024

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 27, 2024

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 27, 2024

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 27, 2024

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 27, 2024

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 27, 2024

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 27, 2024

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 27, 2024

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 27, 2024

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 27, 2024