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Understanding the President’s Cabinet: OMB Director

Note: This is the post #22 in a weekly series of explanatory posts on the officials and agencies included in the President’s Cabinet. See the series introductionhere. Cabinet position:Director of the Office of Management and Budget Department: Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Current Director:Mick Mulvaney Department Mission:“The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) serves the President of the United States in overseeing the implementation of his vision across the Executive Branch. Specifically, OMB’s mission is to assist the President...

Joe Carter: Justice Gorsuch a ‘champion of religious freedom’

On Monday, June 26, the Washington Examinerpublished an article by Ryan Lovelace titled “Conservatives cheer Gorsuch amid flurry of decisions on final day of Supreme Court term.” After concurring with Chief Justice John Roberts on Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, a 7-2 decisionin favor of a church preschool in Missouri,Justice Neil Gorsuch leaves his firsttwo months inthe high court with the approval of many conservatives. In the article, Joe Carter, a senior editor at the Acton Institute, applauds Gorsuch: In his...

Why Seattle’s minimum wage law is now destroying wages

“The city of Seattle has the highest minimum wage in the United States,” notes Dylan Pahman in this week’s Acton Commentary. “While economists and policy-makers continue to debate the issue, a recent working paper from researchers at the University of Washington (UW) raises serious questions about the effectiveness of minimum wage hikes.” In short, the study concludes that the “increase to $13 reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by around 9 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by...

Are slums a sign of human creativity and potential?

As humans, we are made in the image of God. We are co-creators, fashioned to produce and create, contribute and collaborate, give and receive, trade and exchange. Yet far too often, in our approaches to fighting poverty, we subscribe to a fundamental distortion of this reality, treating humans as mere consumers and“drains” on wealth and resources. In the context of poverty, this quickly leads to treating people as the problem, not the solution. “When we put the person at the...

How Genesis ties Christianity to economics and business

Many Christians have a distant, even negative, view of economics and business. Pastors discuss the need for moral activity within the business world, but often ignore whether business in itself is morally justifiable. Some even assume that business activity is a sort of necessary evil; that economics is an academic discipline with little connection to their faith, and often church leaders support economic proposals without understanding plexity of the issues involved. This harms the witness of the Church. In his...

Families with stay-at-home moms pay 5-times more taxes in this nation

U.S. taxpayers are familiar with marriage penalty, but it is not merely a problem facing American families. In the Netherlands, afamily with a stay-at-home mother could pay more than 560 percent more in taxes than an identical family making the exact same e. Ironically, the Dutch tax code treats families with es in vastly disparate ways in the name of equality, explains Arnold Huijgen, Ph.D., in a new essay for Religion & Liberty Transatlantic. This bizarre state of affairs e...

How God makes a smartphone

“Everybody has a cell phone,” Steve Jobs told John Lasseter, chief creative officer at Pixar, “but I don’t know one person who likes their cell phone.” The frustrated CEO of Apple decided to do something about the problem, which lead to one of the greatest products of the modern age. Ten years ago today he released the first version of the famed iPhone. Jobs didn’t invent the smartphone. And while he was the guiding force behind the iPhone, he really...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Nov 16, 2025

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...

Nov 16, 2025

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...

Nov 16, 2025

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...

Nov 16, 2025

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...

Nov 16, 2025

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,...

Nov 16, 2025

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....

Nov 16, 2025

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...

Nov 16, 2025

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...

Nov 16, 2025

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...

Nov 16, 2025