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Anti-GMO Activists: ‘Heartless, Callous and Cruel’

Former Indiana Governor and current Purdue University President Mitch DanielsIf it seems your writer is obsessing over genetically modified organisms in this space, it’s only because the progressive side of the equation won’t let it go. Team Anti-GMO includes the radicalized religious shareholder activists of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility and As You Sow. Whether it’s misrepresenting the science or ignoring pletely, these groups celebrate every GMO labeling initiative and perform handstands every time a mits to producing organic...

Explainer: What is Holy Week?

What is Holy Week? Holy Week is the week before Easter, a period which includes the religious holidays of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Holy week does not include Easter Sunday. When did Holy Week get started? The first recording of a Holy Week observance was made by Egeria, a Gallic woman who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land about 381-384. In an account of her travels she wrote for a group of women back...

The FAQs: State Department Says Actions of Islamic State Constitute Genocide

What did Secretary Kerry say about Islamic State and genocide? In a speech on Thursday, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the U.S. has determined that the actions of Islamic State (aka ISIS) against Christians and other minority groups in Iraq and Syria constitutes an act of genocide. My purpose in appearing before you today is to assert that, in my judgment, Daesh [Islamic State] is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control, including Yezidis, Christians,...

A Conservative’s Plea: Let’s Work Together

Conservatives and liberals both tend to believe that they alone are motivated by love while their opponents are motivated by hate. How can we solve problems with so much polarization? In a recent TED talk, AEI president Arthur Brooks shares ideas for what we can each do as individuals to break the gridlock. “We might just be able to take the ghastly holy war of ideology that we’re suffering under and turn it into petition of ideas,” says Brooks. ...

From Bard to Barber: Jars of Clay’s Stephen Mason on Vocation

For most musicians, the prospect of a longand stable career in the arts is a lifelong dream. For those who actually “make it,” aspirationscan shift in surprising ways. For Jars of Clay, a popular rock band who achieved success in the 1990s — and wrote the music for Acton’s film series,For the Life of the World—that vocational reckoning came late in their careers. After 20 years of full-time work in the music industry, they decided that in order to stay...

Little Sisters of the Poor to the Obama Administration: Don’t Force Us to Violate Our Conscience

The Little Sisters of the Poor,an international congregation of Catholic women religious who serve the elderly poor in over 30 countries around the world, have been given a difficult choice: violate your conscience or pay $70 million a year in fines. For the past few years the Obama administration has been attempting to force the Little Sisters — and other nonprofit religious organizations — to help provide their employees with free access to abortion-inducing drugs, sterilizations, and contraceptives. But on...

Video & Audio: Todd Huizinga On The New Totalitarian Temptation

Acton’s Director of International Outreach Todd Huizinga has been quite busy since therelease of his bookThe New Totalitarian Temptation: Global Governance and the Crisis of Democracy in Europe.Last week Thursday, he continued to talk about this topic in an Acton Lecture Series address that we’re pleased to share with you today on the PowerBlog. Additionally, we’ve posted audio of Todd’s hour-long appearance last night on WBZ Boston’s “Nightside” show with host Dan Rea after the jump. ...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

Welfare: Separating Fact from the Rhetoric

American political discourse has coarsened in recent years. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than with the issue of poverty. As Mary Jo Bane and David T. Ellwood, both currently serving in the Department of Health and Human Services, put it, “when the topic of es up, dialogue often turns angry and judgmental; the prose es purple.” Yet purple prose almost seems appropriate when dealing with today’s welfare system. It is, as many contend, overly expensive; the multiplicity of...

Jul 27, 2024

An American in London

This was one of the last books by the late Dr. Russell Kirk, who was perhaps America’s foremost intellectual conservative, an eminent scholar in the social sciences and humane letters, and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. It might be said to be both a defense of the traditional European-American culture so much under attack by intellectuals and activists today, and a summary of the major cultural contributions of Britain to...

Jul 27, 2024

Making Men Moral

Robert P. George is a Princeton professor, first Vice President of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, and a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. In this book, he has done an admirable job of combining his fields of philosophy (John Finnis was his mentor), law, and political science to analyze the difficult question of how liberal democracy can enact laws that seek to promote civility and personal goodness while upholding basic individual liberties. Although much of the...

Jul 27, 2024

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

Recent years have brought to the fore a drumbeat plaints from evangelical intellectuals bemoaning the ineffectual work of evangelical intellectuals. This theme has been sounded recently by Os Guinness, David Wells, and John Seel, among others, and now Mark Noll weighs in. Noll believes that American evangelicals have made small contribution to the intellectual life of the nation and so have failed not only in their civic duty, but also their religious responsibilities. Christians who take seriously the sovereignty...

Jul 27, 2024

A Botched Look at Social Virtues

Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man, argues that ideological conflicts are over and that the world is converging on democracy-cum-capitalism, with national economies integrated into a global one. However, democracy and capitalism require a healthy civil society, which itself depends on “a people’s habits, customs, and ethics,” which must be “nourished through an increased awareness and respect for culture.” (p. 5) Everyone, Fukuyama maintains, has a deep desire “to have his or her...

Jul 27, 2024

Bargaining With The State

Richard Epstein, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, is intrigued in this book by the ways in which important liberties are threatened by legislative actions designed to distribute various benefits and favors to selected groups of people. As Epstein notes, “The conventional wisdom has it that government is subject to extensive limitation when it regulates and none when it contracts” ( p.312). But, Epstein warns, this simplistic attitude badly ignores the importance of limiting all of government’s...

Jul 27, 2024

The Theme is Freedom

M. Stanton Evans, former editor of The Indianapolis News and chairman of the American Conservative Union, is now director of the National Journalism Center, in Washington, D.C. His exposition here of the place of religion in American public life is a remarkable synthesis of history, sound philosophy and political judgment. In the classic phrase of Fr. Francis Canavan, the great Fordham Jesuit, the present stage of Western culture can be described as “the fag end of the Enlightenment.” For...

Jul 27, 2024

The Politics of Envy

In this wide-ranging sequel to his The Politics of Plunder (Transaction, 1990), Cato Institute senior fellow Doug Bandow draws together essays, columns, and articles to illuminate statism’s rising threat to freedom and religion. A Christian libertarian, Bandow rightly insists that “liberty–the right to exercise choice, free from coercive state regulation–is a necessary precondition for virtue. And virtue is ultimately necessary for the survival of liberty.” Only choices freely made have moral or religious import. Markets work better if people...

Jul 27, 2024

The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832

Large sympathy must inform a reading of The Language of Liberty, for its heterodox reading of the substance of the American Revolution strains against its very helpful survey of the rhetoric of the Revolution. That the American revolutionaries were, in the main, a religious and not a secular people is obvious and beyond cavil, despite the impression conveyed by secular historians of later eras. Clark conveys this suitably and accurately, justifying throughout the book his conclusion that “democracy–in the...

Jul 27, 2024

Civil Religion and Political Theology

What role should Christianity play in the life of the polis? This question has engaged Christian thinkers for two millennia and, judging from this volume, we are no closer to agreement now than we were at the time of the early Church fathers. The contributors to this recently reissued collection of essays, which prised of lectures delivered in the mid-1980s at Boston University’s Institute for Philosophy and Religion, all wish to affirm the relevance of Christian faith to public...

Jul 27, 2024