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Whether welfare recipients should work is a question of values

Should people who receive welfare benefits from the government be required to work? There are at least two ways to consider that question. The first is from the perspective of technical economics. Do work requirements lead to higher rates of employment for welfare beneficiaries? Does a lack of such requirements discourage work? The second is a matter of moral philosophy. Michael R. Strain argues that it’s the latter approach that should be our starting point when considering welfare policy: Whom...

How you can listen to Radio Free Acton

Radio Free Acton, the official podcast of the Acton Institute, has gone through a lot of change in the past year. Now featuring more segments, varied guests and an expanded presence on over twelve podcast apps, Radio Free Acton is easier to listen to than ever before. So how can you make sure you never miss another episode? For many people, especially younger listeners, accessing a podcast may seem obvious. But did you know that48 percentof people still don’t know...

Radio Free Acton: Interview with a Venezuelan dissident; Jared Meyer on the sharing economy

In this episode of Radio Free Acton, Noah Gould, summer intern at Acton, interviews Javier Avila, a Venezuelan dissident who speaks of both the bleak and hopeful future he sees for the resistance against tyrannical government in Venezuela. Then, another Acton summer intern, Jenna Suchyta, talks to Jared Meyer, senior fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, about the sharing economy. Check out these additional resources on this week’s podcast topics: Read “Venezuela: Latin America’s socialist nightmare” by Noah Gould...

Why we borrow and save money

Note: This is post #87 in a weekly video series on basic economics. Why do people borrow and save? How does it affect how we live our lives? And what affects the desire to borrow and save? In this video by Marginal Revolution University, Alex Tabarrok explains the lifecycle theory of savings and how the supply and demand for loanable funds affects our decision to e either borrowers or savers. (If you find the pace of the videos too slow,...

Why we need virtue education

“The wider culture needs virtue education, because a free society relies on certain bedrock moral principles being inculcated and incarnated,” says Josh Herring in this week’s Acton Commentary. We need business men, doctors, lawyers, plumbers, electricians, and grocers who act with the honesty which allows the free market to thrive. Virtue, character, ethics – these things matter profoundly, and it is one of the tasks of education to transfer the system of values from one generation to the next. And...

The U.S. is far more religious than other wealthy nations

Some countries are rich and some countries are religious. But the U.S. is the only country that has higher-than-average levels of both prayer and wealth, according to a new study by Pew Research. In 101 other countries surveyed that have a gross domestic product of more than $30,000 per person, fewer than 40 percent of adults say they pray every day.As the survey notes,more than half of American adults (55 percent) say they pray pared with 25 percent in Canada,...

New Issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality (Vol. 21, No. 1)

The newest issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality has been published online and print copies are ing. This issue is a theme issue on “The Role of Religion in a Free Society,” with guest editors Richard Epstein and Mario Rizzo of New York University School of Law, and Michael McConnell of Stanford Law School. Contributions range from legal analyses to theoretical forays to fascinating case studies all centered on the question of the nature, limits, role, and rights...

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 13, 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 13, 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 13, 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 13, 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 13, 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 13, 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 13, 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 13, 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 13, 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 13, 2026