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It is Unconstitutional for Laws to be Based on Religiously Influenced Moral Reasons?

Is it unconstitutional for laws to be based on their supporters’ religiously founded moral beliefs? While most of us—at least most readers of this blog—would consider such a question to be absurd, some people apparently think it should be answered in the affirmative. Fortunately, legal scholar Eugene Volokh has provided a brilliant rebuttal which explains why “it would be an outrageous discrimination against religious believers to have such a constitutional rule”: My most recent brush with the argument happened with...

On Call in Culture on a Normal Day

I love the scene in the movie, A Beautiful Mind, where it portrays John Nash finding his truly original idea. He isn’t in a library, classroom or lab. No, he is out with his friends in a bar, trying to figure out how to get a group of women to pay attention to him and his buddies. Out of that problem, he discovered a principle that could be applied to situations of much more significance and went on to continue...

Audio: Miller on Kony 2012 & HHS Mandates

Acton’s Director of Media Michael Matheson Miller joined host Dave Jaconette this morning on WJRW Radio in Grand Rapids, Michigan for an interview touching on a number of subjects including 3rd world poverty, Kony 2012, entrepreneurship in the developing world, and even a discussion of the HHS mandate issue. The interview lasts about 20 minutes; Listen via the audio player below: [audio: ...

What Methodism Teaches us about Poverty

We all know the promises government has made over the years about how certain programs and initiatives would eradicate poverty. But perhaps nothing rivals the Methodist movement in terms of effectively stamping out poverty in England. Charles Edward White and Bobby Butler’s essay “John Wesley’s Church Planting Movement: Discipleship that Transformed a Nation and Changed the World” is a splendid overview of Methodism’s impact on English society, especially as it relates to the middle class explosion. People of faith understand...

Why Economics Can’t Explain the Problems of the New Lower Class

If only we would use public policy to generate working-class jobs at good wages, some progressives argue, the problems of the new lower class would fade away. But as social scientist Charles Murray explains, there are two problems with this line of argument: The purported causes don’t explain the effects, and whether they really were the causes doesn’t make much difference anyway. Start with the prevalent belief that the labor market affected marriage because of the disappearance of the “family...

There’s No Size or Space in Subsidiarity

When thinking and talking about principle of subsidiarity I’ve tended to resort to using metaphors of size and space (i.e.,nothing should be done by a higher orlargerorganization which can be done as well by a smalleror lower organization). But philosopher Brandon Watson explains why that is not really what subsidiarity is all about: The subsidiarity principle is often paired with the principle of solidarity, and there is a real connection between the two. Solidarity is the active sense of responsibility...

Celebrate Spring with AU Online!

Spring is almost here! In celebration of my favorite season, I invite you to visit the new and improved AU Online website. There, you’ll find information about the spring 2012 course offerings and enjoy free access to Acton’s core curriculum, our four part foundational series. Our first live session, Private Charity: A Practitioner’s View, will take place March 27 and feature the highly rated Acton lecturer Rudy Carrasco speaking from his years of experience on the front lines of urban...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 2026

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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 2026