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Tea Party Catholic: Can Catholics Save the American Experiment?

Giovanni Patriarca recently sat down with Acton Research director, Samuel Gregg, to discuss his latest book, Tea Party Catholic. Patriarca, Acton’s 2012 Novak Award winner, began by asking Gregg what the “most alarming and peculiar aspects” are of America losing its “historical memory” and running the “risk of deconstruction of its own identity.” The American Founding was certainly influenced by certain streams of Enlightenment thought, not all of which (such as social contract theory) patible with Catholic faith. Yet as...

Hollywood Hates The Economic System That Makes It Rich

John Stossel is fed up with celebrities whining about the very economic system that made them rich. From Russell Brand demanding redistribution of wealth to George Lucas decrying “capitalist democracy,” celebrities who are rolling in dough seem to be suffering from some sort of entrepreneurial guilt. Of course, they aren’t feeling guilty enough to ditch one of their seven planes (à la Harrison Ford) so as to lower their carbon foot print, but guilty enough to tell us that capitalism...

Free Book Giveaway: Part 1 of Kuyper’s ‘Common Grace’

Christian’s Library Presshas released the first in itsseries of English translationsof Abraham Kuyper’s most famous work,Common Grace, a three-volume work of practical public theology. This release,Noah-Adam, is the first of three parts in Volume 1: The Historical Section. To celebrate,CLP will be giving awaytwocopies of the book. To enter, use the interface below. There are three ways to enter, and each will increase your odds. The contest will end Friday night at 11:59 p.m. a Rafflecopter giveaway [product sku=”1422″] ...

The Secret Ingredient for Effective Healthcare Reform

In today’s Acton Commentary I explore how our hyper-regulated and increasingly statist healthcare system is chasing off good physicians. A recent article in Forbes by Bruce Japsen provides some additional support for that argument: Doctor and nurse vacancies are approaching nearly 20 percent at hospitals as these facilities prepare to be inundated by millions of patients who have the ability to pay for medical care thanks to the Affordable Care Act. A survey by health care provider staffing firm AMN...

When It Comes to Eagle-Killing, Cronyism Trumps Religious Liberty

There are currently two sets of laws in America: laws that apply to everyone and laws that apply to everyone except for friends of the Obama administration. In JanuaryI wroteabout how the executive branch had argued that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 should be broadly interpreted in order to impose criminal liability for actions that indirectly result in a protected bird’s death. The administration used that reasoning to file criminal charges against three panies. Yet while one section...

Remembering Business and Rebuilding the City

Several months ago, in the wake of Detroit’s bankruptcy and the flurry of discussions surrounding it, Chris Horstand I co-wrote a post on how Christians mustn’t forget or neglect the role of business in our attempts to rebuild, restore, and reinvigorate failing cities. In the latest issue of The City, we return to the topic, expanding a bit more on what exactly businesses contribute — materially, socially, and spiritually — and how Christians might adjust their imaginations in response. If...

Inflation and the Minimum Wage

In yesterday’s edition of The Transom, which I highly mend, Ben Domenech included a discussion that places the debates over raising the minimum wage within the broader context of the effects of inflation more generally. Here’s a section: There shouldn’t be any debate about the reality of the problem that the costs of basic staples, health care, and higher education are chewing up ever-increasing portions of the median family budget which is, in inflation-adjusted terms, smaller than it’s been since...

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 9, 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 9, 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 9, 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 9, 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 9, 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 9, 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 9, 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 9, 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 9, 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 9, 2026