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Updated: Sirico Promotes ‘Defending the Free Market’ on Cavuto, Kresta, Hewitt

Acton President Rev. Robert A. Sirico continues to promote Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy on radio and television across the country. Yesterday, Father Robert spent a full broadcast hour with Al Kresta on Ave Maria Radio’s Kresta in the Afternoon: [audio: And if you missed it, here’s Father Robert’s appearance from yesterday on Your World With Neil Cavuto on the Fox News Channel: UPDATE: Here’s the audio from Father Robert’s interview last night on...

Virtuous Capitalism and the Financial Crisis

The Acton Institute recently hosted a conference in California with David Bahnsen and the Center for Cultural Leadership. Conference audio is now available online via YouTube. You can learn more about the event here. Listen to Rev. Sirico’s talk, “Can We Be Free Without Economic Freedom,” below. Other speakers included: Dr. P. Andrew Sandlin on “The Theological Roots of the Financial Crisis“Mr. David L. Bahnsen on “What Caused the Financial Crisis: The Left AND Right Have It Wrong” (Part I...

Get a Free Chapter of ‘Defending the Free Market’

Acton Institute has crafted a website for Rev. Robert Sirico’s new book, Defending the Free Market. With this you can give the web address to your friends for an easy-to-remember access point to the book. Other notable things about the site include: Free introduction chapter to Defending the Free Market.List of press mentions for the book from the Acton PowerBlogA video message from Rev. Robert Sirico What are you waiting for? Find out more about Defending the Free Market at...

On the Morality of Capitalism

“It is mon belief that capitalism ‘delivers the goods’ and creates prosperity,” says Isaac Morehouse, but does so only at the cost of our souls, our dignity and our humanity.” Many people doubt capitalism not because they fail to see its wealth-generating capacity, but because they believe it to be immoral. I wish to contest the idea that capitalism is immoral and present evidence to the contrary. Not only do I believe capitalism passes the minimum test by failing to...

Os Guinness on Separation of Powers

I recently finished the advanced copy of Os Guinness’s A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future. I posted a previous excerpt on the topic of virtue in a free republic a couple of weeks ago. In recent writing and speaking about President Calvin Coolidge, it is encouraging to study a leader who saw himself as a civic educator rather than an imperial president. We need a cultural change before we can ever expect reasonable change in the...

What is ‘Meaningful Work’?

Telling young people that some jobs are menial, says Thomas Sowell, is a huge disservice to them and to society: It was painful, for example, to see an internationally renowned scholar say that what e young people needed was “meaningful work.” But this is a mon among educated elites, regardless of how counterproductive its consequences may be for society at large, and for e youngsters especially. What is “meaningful work”? The underlying notion seems to be that it is work...

A Digital Scriptorium on Mt Sinai

The Egypt Independent has a fascinating account of the process underway now to digitize the first-millennium manuscripts housed at St. Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula. Writer James Purtill interviewed the librarian, a native Texan named Father Justin, about the task of preserving thousands of priceless books and the new library under construction, which he hopes to write about on the monastery blog when it opens. Every morning [Fr. Justin] attends the 4:30 am service — which has not changed...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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 30, 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 30, 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 30, 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 30, 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 30, 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 30, 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 30, 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,...

May 30, 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 30, 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...

May 30, 2026