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Make Maximilian Kolbe of Auschwitz ‘the patron saint of entrepreneurs’: Petition

Fr. Maximilian Kolbe is well-known for volunteering to die in place of another prisoner at Auschwitz. However, his history as a pioneering entrepreneur, who used the latest technology and managerial techniques to increase his ministry’s outreach, has inspired a new movement for the pope to name him “the patron saint of entrepreneurs and start-ups.” The fascinating history of how the Polish Franciscan used innovative techniques, employed the latest forms munications, and oversaw hundreds of workers is the subject of a...

China’s ‘Social Credit System’: When dystopian fiction becomes reality

Growing up, I was fascinated with authors such as Ayn Rand, Aldous Huxley, Lois Lowry, George Orwell, and others who developed dystopian worlds through their writing. Reading their works was a fun way to explore the extremes that our society would never e. According to a recent article inWiredby Rachel Botsman, some of those fictional worlds ing ever closer to reality, with the Chinese government developing a new algorithm that will allow them to rank their citizens on a so-called...

Radio Free Acton: Joe Carter on wealth creation; Upstream on recent Jazz releases

On this episode of Radio Free Acton, Marc Vander Maas talks to Joe Carter, senior editor at the Acton Institute, on wealth creation versus redistribution of wealth. Then, on the Upstream segment, Bruce Edward Walker discusses recent jazz releases with Daniel Montgomery, former director of marketing and design at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Check out these additional resources on this week’s podcast topics: “How should the church encourage wealth creation?” by Joe Carter “Getting serious about poverty means...

Americans would probably ban hateful speech—if we could agree on what speech is hateful

A slight majority of Americans oppose banning hateful and offensive speech—but mostly because we can’t agree on what speech is hateful and offensive. That’s a key takeaway from the Cato Institute’s new survey report, “The State of Free Speech and Tolerance in America.” The findings in almost every category are distressing for those who abhor offensive speech but believe it should remain legal to express such sentiments in the public square. According to the report, only 59 percent of Americans...

Venezuelan political prisoners awarded top EU human rights award

The EU has taken a symbolic stance against the worst human rights tragedy in South America, awarding its top human rights prize to the political prisoners and defiant opposition inNicolás Maduro’s Venezuela. The European Parliament announced the recipient of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought last Thursday, explicitly mentioning the socialist nation’s “political prisoners.” Eugénio Lopes provides the details about the award, named for the famous Soviet dissident, in a new essay forReligion & Liberty Transatlantic. The president of...

The further reformation of all of life

“One of the famous formulas e out of the Reformation era is that ofsemper reformanda, which means ‘always reforming,’” says Jordan Ballor in this week’s Acton Commentary. “This is a particularly appropriate topic for this observance of Reformation Day, now 500 years after Luther’s publication of the 95 Theses.” The point of departure for the Protestant Reformation was originally a somewhat limited set of topics or doctrines, particularly those related to soteriology the doctrine of salvation. In this sense Luther’s...

How should the church encourage wealth creation?

Earlier this year two evangelical groups, theLausanne MovementandBAM Global, released apaper on the role of wealth creation in the church to address these question. In the paper they note that wealth creation is a godly gift that is frequently misunderstood. Too many Christians still have a rigid divide between the sacred and secular, which causes them to miss that “God’s concerns are holistic, and so is the mission of the church.” Another problem is that many pastors lack any experience...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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 28, 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 28, 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 28, 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 28, 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 28, 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 28, 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 28, 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 28, 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 28, 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 28, 2026