RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
6 Quotes: Thomas Jefferson on liberty and government
Today is the 275th birthday of Thomas Jefferson. Since our third president would object to us celebrating his birthday (“The only birthday I memorate,” Jefferson once said, “is that of our Independence, the Fourth of July.”) let’s take this opportunity to instead look at six quotes by Jefferson on liberty and government. On personal liberty: “Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every es into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the...
Cronyism fueled the murder of a Slovak journalist
“Slovakia has been living through one of the most turbulent times in its young history,” says Martina Bobulová in this week’s Acton Commentary. “It has been almost a month since the murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová, which have put these events in motion.” Much has changed in past four weeks – the nation went to the streets and the country experienced the biggest public protests since the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Robert Fico’s third...
The Social Capital Index: A geography of ‘associational life’ in America
In recent decades, America has experienced a wave of economic and social disruption. In our search for solutions, however, we tend to look only at the surface, assessing the architecture of particular policies or stroking our chins over economic measurements like Gross Domestic Product. But what if we had a deeper view of the dynamics beneath the surface? What if we had way to measure, assess, and observe the state of“associational life”in America (as Alexis de Tocqueville may have called...
Socialists outraged as French president says Christianity can cure economic malaise
Faithlessness is so ingrained in French culture that the president’s mere consultation with the nation’s Christian leaders apparently verges on a constitutional crisis. Emmanuel Macron appealed to the nation’s clergy to bring their faith’s insights to bear on national issues, specifically economic stagnation and human dignity. But his decision to meet with the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of France(CEF) and400 guests inside the College des Bernardinsin Paris on Monday set off a national row over whether he had violated the principle...
Radio Free Acton: Discussion on Communism in Cuba; Tech & work part II: Growing technology in agriculture
On this episode of Radio Free Acton, Acton’s director of programs and education, Paul Bonicelli, talks to John Suarez, research director at the Center for a Free Cuba. This talk is a preview of an ing event at Acton on April 17: Communism in Cuba, its international impact, the democratic resistance and U.S. Cuba policy. Then, on the next Tech and the Future of Work segment, Dan Churchwell, Acton’s associate director of program outreach, speaks with Kevin Scott, a soybean...
RELIGION & LIBERTY
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,...
May 1, 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...
May 1, 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...
May 1, 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...
May 1, 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....
May 1, 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...
May 1, 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...
May 1, 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...
May 1, 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...
May 1, 2026
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved