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The life of the late British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm is subject of Richard J. Evans’ newest book Eric Hobsbawm – A Life in History (2019). Evans is a scholar of Nazi Germany and like Hobsbawm, a former professor at Cambridge University. Before I start to analyze Evans’ book, I must make a personal note: My attachment to Hobsbawm’s work is not only intellectual but emotional. The first substantial book on history read by me was his The Age of...

Religious faith: It’s a market?

When a market is mentioned, buying, selling, and everyday business activities e to mind. Economists Rachel M. McCleary and Robert J. Barro have a broader focus in their new book, The Wealth of Religions: The Political Economy of Believing and Belonging. Building on over a decade of work considering religion and economic growth, the authors approach religion as an economist would study any market characterized by demand and supply. The Wealth of Religions develops insights into economic and social situations...

Winners of 2019 Mini-Grants on Free Market Economics

The Acton Institute Mini-Grants on Free Market Economics program accepts proposals from faculty members at colleges, seminaries, and universities in the United States and Canada in order to promote the scholarship and teaching of market economics. This program allows for collaboration between faculty from different universities, as well as help future leaders to emerge, strengthen, and expand the existing network of scholars within economics. Entrants may submit proposals in two broad categories: course development and faculty scholarship. Here is plete...

Moral and religious people created by God not the state

Last week Joe Carter helpfully gathered many of the contributions to what John Zmirak has called ‘The Iran-Iraq War Among Conservatives’. This at times heated exchange is largely between liberal and illiberal American conservatives and it is an important and lively one. I’m squarely in the liberal conservative camp believing, with Lord Acton, that freedom is the highest political good. It would be wrong, however, to dismiss the very real concerns and anxieties of the illiberal conservatives. The best articulation...

Introduction to fiscal policy

Note: This is post #124 in a weekly video series on basic economics. What is fiscal policy? As economist Tyler Cowen explains, it’s a government’s policies on taxes, spending, and borrowing. But how it’s practiced is a little plicated. Fiscal policy can be used in an effort to mitigate fluctuations in the business cycle so as to soften the effects of booms and busts. In this video by Marginal Revolution University, Cowen discusses expansionary fiscal policy and explains the “fiscal...

Who are the candidates for UK prime minister/Conservative Party leader?

Nominations for the leadership of the Conservative Party – and, thus, to e the next prime minister of the United Kingdom – closed at 5 p.m. London time (noon EDT). The list of successful candidates was released by the 1922 Committee an hour later. Under new Tory rules, a candidate needed the support of eight Members of Parliament, up from two, in order to advance to the first round of voting. The 10 candidates running to succeed Theresa May as...

Progressive activists object to State Department panel on ‘unalienable rights’

Two weeks ago the Department of State announced its intention to create a Commission on Unalienable Rights. The stated purpose of the Commission will be to “provide the Secretary of State advice and mendations concerning international human rights matters. The Commission will provide fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.” An unalienable right is a right that cannot be bartered away, or given away, or...

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...

Oct 25, 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...

Oct 25, 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...

Oct 25, 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...

Oct 25, 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....

Oct 25, 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...

Oct 25, 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...

Oct 25, 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...

Oct 25, 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...

Oct 25, 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,...

Oct 25, 2026