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The 5 most dangerous countries to be a Christian in 2018

For the sixteenth consecutive year, North Korea is ranked as the most oppressive place in the world for Christians, according to the international non-profit ministry Open Doors. Every year Open Doors publishes the World Watch List to highlight the plight of persecuted Christians around the world. The list represents believers “who are arrested, harassed, tortured—even killed—for their faith.” The list measures the degree of freedom a Christian has to live out their faith in five spheres of life (private, munity,...

The minimum wage is speeding the robot apocalypse?

Intellectuals like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk increasingly worry about an apocalyptic world awaiting in the not-too-distant future, when automation replaces all human work(and, in time, artificial intelligence displaces humanity). A new UK study finds the robots may have found an ally: a higher minimum wage. A looming increase in the minimum wage will likely result in a robots replacing a growing number of workers, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). The UK’s minimum wage – the National...

Radio Free Acton: Liz Forkin Bohannon on wealth creation and effective poverty alleviation; Upstream on Godless

On this week’s episode of Radio Free Acton, Caroline Roberts speaks with Liz Forkin Bohannon, CEO and Founder of Sseko Designs, on wealth creation and effective poverty alleviation. Then, on the Upstream segment, Bruce Edward Walker hosts a roundtable discussion with Acton staffers on Godless, a new Western show by Netflix. Check out these additional resources on this week’s podcast topics: Register for the Acton Institute’s lecture series event: Family Breakdown and the Economy Sseko Designs ‘Godless’ IMDb Learn more...

Why Catholic Social Teaching falls on deaf ears

“While popes and bishops preach about the duties to the poor and suffering,” says Kishore Jayabalan in this week’s Acton Commentary, “the dilemma of how to help is usually left for the laity to figure out on their own” While CST explicitly speaks of ing all, it implicitly recognizes that unlimited multiculturalism is not feasible. The burdens and costs of ing ers are real and must be shared to be made acceptable. But what happens when some refuse to do...

What Monopoly can teach us about the purpose of markets and money

The game of Monopoly has brought generations of people together, even as it’s somehow managed to tear friends and family apart. Indeed, amid all the fun and frivolity, it’s still a cut-throat game driven by luck, exploitation, and money-lust. Just like the actual marketplace, right? Alas, despite being “just a game,” Monopoly has surely done its share of feeding the various pop-culture caricatures of plete with a twirly-mustached mascot. But despite those subtle distortions, perhaps it can still teach us...

Czech commies want to tax church property stolen by Czech commies

Imagine your property is stolen and then having to have this conversation. Government authorities: “Good news, we recovered your stolen property!” You: “That’s great! When can I get it back?” Gov: “Eh, the bad news is we can only give you back 56 percent of what was stolen.” You: “Well, I guess that’s better than nothing.” Gov: “The good news is that you’ll receive cash as restitution for the rest.” You: “Oh wow. That’s incredible!” Gov: “The bad news is...

Video: Alex Chafuen discusses the causes and consequences of inflation in Latin America (Spanish)

2017 was a difficult year for many in Latin America. While Mexico endured 6.77 percent inflation, Argentina reached 24.5 percent and Venezuelans suffered a whopping 2,616 percent inflation. parison, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the United States saw inflation between 2.0 and 1.7 percent in 2017. Alex Chafuen, managing director of international outreach at Acton, recently addressed the issues in Latin America on NTN24 “Nuestra Tele Noticias.” Chafuen denounces how inflation feeds corruption, especially in Venezuela and Argentina....

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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 2026