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The Free-Market Case Against Big Business

“The most dangerous enemies of capitalism today are capitalists,” says Timothy P. Carney. “This is ing clearer every day to mitted to free markets.” The conservative and libertarian grassroots came to deeply distrust big business after the Wall Street bailouts and Obama’s stimulus and health care bills, both of which had big-business backing. Tea Party ire focused on subsidy-suckling businesses as much as at big-spending politicians. Beltway conservatives have also joined in the fight against corporatism. Last spring, the Club...

Commentary: Black Scholars Give Obama an “F”

Under the policies and leadership of the Obama administration, the economic lives of struggling blacks are now worse, not better, than they were three years ago.“If the president were to give an account of his administration’s advancement of African Americans he would be hard pressed to describe anything significant beyond funneling redistributed wealth into government bureaucracies, atraditional pathto the middle class for blacks,”says Anthony B. Bradley in this week’s Acton Commentary (published July 11).The full text of his essay follows....

‘Defending the Free Market’ Makes WORLD’s Top Five

Rev. Robert Sirico, Acton Institute president and co-founder, released Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy, in late May and the book has been no stranger to critical acclaim ever since. The latest? Defending the Free Market cracks WORLDMagazine’stop five business books of the past year. Sirico’s book is critically necessary for 2012 says David Bahnsen, senior vice president at a leading financial firm: Attacks on Mitt Romney’s time at private equity firm Bain Capital are...

God Has Set Eternity in the Human Heart

The Preacher says that God “has set eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11 NIV). This is within the broader context of his discussion of the paradox of exploring the wonder of God’s creation and the vanity of human striving in a fallen world. But the more immediate context is a discussion of work. In verse 9 he asks, “What do workers gain from their toil?” A bit earlier he discusses the meaningless of work, but concludes that “a person...

USCCB Calls for Reductions in Agriculutral Subsidies

Last week, PowerBlogger Andrew Knot and I wrote posts about American sugar policy and farm subsidies, respectively. Now, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, as well as the Catholic Relief Services and National Catholic Rural Life Conference, e out with a joint letter on the 2012 farm bill that just passed the Senate. Among other things, they urge Congress to reduce agricultural subsidies, and limiting crop insurance to small and medium sized farms. In 2010, the government gave out...

Breathing Eden’s Air: A Review by Makoto Fujimura

In the current issue of Books & Culture,artist, writer, speaker, and cultural influencer Makoto Fujimurahas written a review of Wisdom & Wonder: a fresh translation of the last 10 chapters of Volume 3 in the Common Grace set. Volume 1 is slated to be released in early 2013. Fujimura begins the review expressing his indebtedness to Kuyper whose experiences cover a variety of areas reminiscent of Fujimura’s upbringing and are still very much relevant today though they were written more...

‘The Pope & the CEO’ on WORLD’s Top Five

Andreas Widmer joins Rev. Robert Sirico on WORLD Magazine’s best business books of 2011-2012 list with The Pope & the CEO: John Paul II’s Leadership Lessons to a Young Swiss Guard named as a top five book in business. Widmer is an Acton Research Fellow in Entrepreneurship and a 2012 Acton University lecturer. Here’s what David Bahnsen, senior vice president at a leading financial firm, had to say about Widmer’s book: Many evangelicals are writing and reading about character in...

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...

Nov 6, 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...

Nov 6, 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...

Nov 6, 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...

Nov 6, 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,...

Nov 6, 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...

Nov 6, 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...

Nov 6, 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....

Nov 6, 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...

Nov 6, 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...

Nov 6, 2026