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The Trump tariffs hurt the poor, increase unemployment, and will cost you $915 a year

Would you like the federal government to implement a policy that would reduce GDP, increase unemployment, benefit almost every country in the world except for the U.S., and cost you $915 a year? If so, you’re in luck! Those are just some of the impacts of current and proposed US trade actions under Section 232 and 301 of US trade law, aka, the Trump tariffs. A new missioned by Koch Industries and conducted by consulting firm ImpactECON, looked at the...

Radio Free Acton: The legacy of C.S. Lewis; Marvel’s Daredevil

On this episode of Radio Free Acton, producer Caroline Roberts speaks with Michael Ward, a British Scholar and professor of apologetics at Houston Baptist University, about the work of the 20th century writer C.S. Lewis, in time for the anniversary of Lewis’ birthday on November 29. After that, host Bruce Walker speaks with Bradley Birzer, professor of history at Hillsdale College, about the legacy of Stan Lee and the new, third season of Marvel’s Netflix show, Daredevil. Check out these...

Demographic decline: Ben Franklin’s two cents

Not one of Benjamin Franklin’s better-known works, but one worth reading nonetheless, is a brief 1751 essay called Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c. Franklin covers a lot of ground in just a few pages, and brings up quite a few ideas menting on, but I wanted to highlight one paragraph and its relevance for the “birth dearth” we see in the West today. Franklin explains, “Home Luxury in the Great, increases the Nation’s Manufacturers employ’d...

Catherine of Siena: negotiator, savior of Rome

Why would a lay Dominican woman from the so-called “dark ages” have any lasting relevance in today’s world? For one reason, Catherine of Siena, was no ordinary woman. And she eventually became no ordinary saint. She was the saint of “burning love” for her passionate sense of service, reform and justice. It was St. Catherine who famously said: “Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire.” Her infectious magnanimity and heroic life of...

3 problems with effective altruism

In an extremely disturbing video, a two year old girl is run over by a truck in a China. Shortly after being run over, three strangers walk past the girl and do nothing. Eventually, a street cleaner picks her up and transports her to the hospital where she later dies. Utilitarian philosopher, Peter Singer, uses this real world example in a TEDTalk that has now received over 1 million views to make a point about our global charity and aid...

On #GivingTuesday, avoid benevolent harm

Now that the giving season is upon us we should ask, says Andrew Vanderput in this week’s Acton Commentary, “How can one’s charity actually undermine the causes or people they mean to champion?” When charity is defined as “willing the good of the other,” it ought to necessitate that more reflection and thought be given towards the practical effects of one’s charitable acts. To will the good of the other goes far beyond a sugar high feeling after a donate...

Christmas consumerism: A symbol of materialism or generosity?

In the days after Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and all the rest, the Christmas shopping season is well underway—and with it, a peculiar blend of hyper-generosity and hyper-consumerism. Surely there is much to celebrate, and not just in the social and spiritual glories of human exchange and gift-giving. Such activity is also creative and productive in an economic sense, serving to bolster businesses, boost employment, and accelerate economic growth.But amid the opportunities for creative service and extravagant peting temptations of...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Aug 3, 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...

Aug 3, 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...

Aug 3, 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....

Aug 3, 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,...

Aug 3, 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...

Aug 3, 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...

Aug 3, 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...

Aug 3, 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...

Aug 3, 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...

Aug 3, 2026