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6 Quotes: Justice Anthony Kennedy on freedom of speech

Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy announced yesterday that at the end of next month he will retire from the U.S. Supreme Court. When he nominated Kennedy, President Ronald Reagan called the justice a “true conservative.” But over the years, Kennedy often served as a “swing vote” and sided with the court’s liberal faction in a vast number of substantial rulings. For this reason many conservatives (including me) are relieved to be able to replace him on the high court. Yet there...

Pope affirms freedom of press while Myanmar journalists remain jailed

Freedom of the press is a ponent to a virtuous, flourishing society, as Pope Francis affirmed on June 20 when he called for greater liberty for the press. The e six months into the detention of two Reuters reporters by the Myanmar government. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were investigating a massacre of Rohingya Muslims by the military and Buddhist civilians in September of last year. They were invited to meet with a police officer, given some documents, and...

‘Who is Juan de Mariana’ explained in 8 minutes

Economists’ appreciation for the School of Salamanca, andthe contribution that it made to their discipline, has grown in recent years. An economics professor has just released a podcast encapsulating the teachings of its best-known figure, the Jesuit theologian Juan de Mariana – and it takes just eight minutes of your time. Lucas M. Engelhardt, an associate professor of economics at Kent State University’s Stark Campus, discusses the Spanish thinker’s distinction between rulers and tyrants, the immorality of inflation, and the...

What conservatives and progressives get wrong about civil society

In the wake of modernity, we’ve seen in an increasing divide between individual and state—a simultaneous acceleration in both self-exultation and blind deference to the power and might of “collective action.” The result has been a cultural amnesia regarding the middle layers of civil society. To what degree have we neglected that space—from families to churches, from charities to any range of economic enterprises and activities? What might we be missing or forgetting about these basic institutions that, up until...

Radio Free Acton redux: Why Abraham Kuyper matters

On this episode of Radio Free Acton, we revisit a segment aired 2 years ago. Marc Vander Maas, Audio/Visual Manager at Acton, talks to Jordan Ballor, Senior Research Fellow and Director of Publishing at Acton, about why the Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper remains relevant to this day. Check out these additional resources on this week’s podcast topics: Read “How Kuyper can bring evangelicals and Catholics together” by Joe Carter Watch abook discussion on Kuyper and Islam Read “Themelios...

Statement from Rev. Robert A. Sirico on the Supreme Court’s Janus Decision

The Catholic Church has supported workers’ rights from Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum to the present day when es to defending worker safety and human dignity. Catholic social teaching has never said that people may be forced to join unions or financially support unions, private or public. Such coercion would violate the principle of free association upon which popes from Leo XIII have grounded the right to form and join unions. What the Supreme Court determined in the...

Is Pope Francis’ economic critique holding back the poor?

Earlier this month, Pope Francis addressed a roomful of top oil executives panies such as BP and Norwegian Oil, imploring them to solve the energy deficit in developing nations, while issuing a challenge to keep that energy clean and renewable. “Our desire to ensure energy for all must not lead to the undesired effect of a spiral of extreme climate changes due to a catastrophic rise in global temperatures, harsher environments and increased levels of poverty,” Francis said. As Francis...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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,...

Mar 19, 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...

Mar 19, 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...

Mar 19, 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...

Mar 19, 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...

Mar 19, 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...

Mar 19, 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....

Mar 19, 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...

Mar 19, 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...

Mar 19, 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...

Mar 19, 2026