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Reading an immigrant’s love letter to the West

Moving from the former USSR to the U.K., a popular YouTuber has a lot to say about the glories of the West—and the perils of mistaking microaggressions for real oppression. Read More… For regular listeners of the Triggernometry YouTube podcast, much of the content and tone of co-host Konstantin Kisin’s just-published nonfiction book, An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West, e as no surprise. Part memoir and part mentary, the book recounts the arc of Kisin’s family story as it...

Student loan forgiveness is unforgivable

Don’t kid yourselves: Those student loans will be paid back. The question is by whom? And is that in any way fair? Read More… The first iron law of economics is that we live in a world of scarcity. Because of this, economics puts constraints on our utopias. Rinse and repeat. This is how we discern between good and disastrous policies. Student-loan bailouts fall into the disastrous category. There are two arguments to be made here: the moral and the...

Pope Francis wants us to pray for small and medium-sized enterprises

In a surprising change in tone, Pope Francis issued a call to pray for businesspeople who “dedicate an immense creative capacity to changing things from the bottom up.” Is the class-warfare rhetoric over? Read More… Who would ever have guessed this would happen? Well, it did. And in the quiet month of Rome’s roasting August, when the city experiences a near-total exodus to cooler climes. Very few journalists, in either the religious or secular press, noticed. Yet, it rightfully made...

Despite the critical backlash, Persuasion largely persuades

Has there been a recent production more lavishly condemned than Netflix’s new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion? Nevertheless, the contemporary touches merit your attention. Read More… Can an unmarried woman e a guide to romance? It certainly appears so with Jane Austen (1775–1817), spinster author of sharp, witty novels of manners set in early 19th-century England, who has e something of a belated authority on navigating the rocky shores of modern romance. A film from 2007, The Jane Austen Book...

Is It Time for a Minimum Corporate Tax?

The Law of Unintended Consequences has not been rescinded. Don’t be surprised if corporations find loopholes to circumvent new tax laws intended to get them to “pay their fair share.” Read More… Big reforms should be based on wide consensus. At the height of an economic crisis caused by bined effects of the pandemic lockdowns and sanctions for Russia’s war in Ukraine, further economic experiments such as a global minimum corporate tax could easily e another example of thelaw of...

The Trump raid will only harden Americans’ positions

The search of Mar-a-Lago is not the first time a high-ranking official (or former official) has been under intense criminal investigation. But it may be the first time that public trust in the integrity of the agencies carrying out that investigation has been this low. Read More… It’s 1973. The Watergate scandal that would ultimately doom the presidency of Richard M. Nixon is roiling that administration. But it’s not the only breach of public trust dogging the Nixon White House....

Edmund Burke Can Still Inspire the American Right

Does rereading the great 18th-century statesman, political philosopher, and economic thinker hold the key to resolving the tensions within American conservatism today? Read More… It’s no secret that the modern American conservative movement is divided today. Issues like the role of government, the place of the nation-state, and the extent to which free markets should prevail in economic life have e major points of fracture across the right that seem unlikely to be resolved soon. In times of such division,...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

May 18, 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....

May 18, 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,...

May 18, 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...

May 18, 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...

May 18, 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...

May 18, 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...

May 18, 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...

May 18, 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...

May 18, 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...

May 18, 2026