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‘Created Equal’: Clarence Thomas embodies the power of a biblical worldview

One must praise conservative material that airs on PBS for the same reason one must take note of shooting stars: for parative rarity and brevity of the experience. Yet high praise is due to the taxpayer-funded network for airing the magisterial documentary Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words on May 18. Much of the justice’s rags-to-black-robes story had been told in his autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son, but without his own resonant voice and Solomonic demeanor. Much of the...

Rev. Robert Sirico: The secular marginalization of the church during COVID-19

As some Americans in some states are being granted the “permission” to return to church services, Rev. Robert Sirico, president and co-founder of the Acton Institute, reminds us that government bureaucrats will never be more concerned about the personal and spiritual needs of believers than their own pastors. Rev. Sirico shares his thoughts on how both the church and faithful have been marginalized by the state during the pandemic, and on the historical role that churches have played as first...

Acton online conference: “Banned” wagon? Why dissenting freethinkers are censured on social media.

The Acton Institute’s Rome office is sponsoring an online seminar on Thursday, May 28, at 7 p.m., Central European Time: “‘Banned’ wagon? Why dissenting freethinkers are censured on social media.” The topic is most timely as independent voices–doctors, scientists, economists, activists, and journalists whose duty it is to be inquisitive–are being silenced by social media giants like Facebook and YouTube. Now, even Google has joined the “banned” wagon, removing content it considers “misinformation” from its private file-sharing accounts on Google...

A recipe for economic recovery from COVID-19

With the focus on COVID-19 shifting from the health emergency (easing) to getting the economy going again (glimmers of hope), it’s easy to forget just how good the economy was before the pandemic hit. Recall that in mid-February, financial news organizations were reporting that the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite indexes were hitting record highs. In “Getting America Back to Work.” (Encounter Books, 2020), Andy Puzder has drawn a sharp contrast between the eight-year stagnation and regulatory overkill of...

Minnesota religious leaders resist Gov. Walz’s ban on church gatherings

As Minnesota prepares for its next phase of reopening—which includes malls, casinos, salons, restaurants and bars—local churches have grown frustrated with the lack of clarity and guidance on the expectations for munities and houses of worship. Now, given Gov. Tim Walz’s indefinite extension of the ban on gatherings of 10 or more people at church services, several of the state’s religious leaders are pushing back. Leaders from the Minnesota Catholic Conference and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in Minnesota say they...

Acton Line podcast: Is it time for a universal basic income?

For over two years, former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang campaigned across the country, building a coalition along the political spectrum. The main promise driving Yang’s campaign was his “freedom dividend,” a guaranteed e of $1,000 per month for every American citizen. This “dividend” is a form of universal basic e, an idea that’s been around for centuries and one that’s gaining popularity, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. People who support versions of universal basic e say it would solve...

Rev. Robert Sirico: Churches are ‘the first of the first responders’

During the coronavirus pandemic, the media crowned a new set of heroes: healthcare workers, essential employees, and first responders. But politicians who classify church attendance as non-essential ignore the fact that churches “are the first of the first responders,” says Acton Institute President and Co-founder Rev. Robert A. Sirico. Rev. Sirico makes the observation during a brief interview on the Fox News Channel’s Your World with Neil Cavuto, which aired on Friday, May 22. “This is not the first time...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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....

Jul 23, 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...

Jul 23, 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...

Jul 23, 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...

Jul 23, 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...

Jul 23, 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...

Jul 23, 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,...

Jul 23, 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...

Jul 23, 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...

Jul 23, 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...

Jul 23, 2026