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A crash course on how to interpret the U.S. Constitution

Today is Constitution Day, a holiday celebrated in America every year on September 17, the anniversary of the day the framers signed the document. The U.S. Constitution is arguably one of the most important legal documents in the history of the world. Because of this venerated status, though, many people assume that you need to be a Juris Doctor (J.D.) and an expert on recondite Constitutional law to understand how to read the document, much less interpret the Constitution. But...

Post-industrial economics: Studying human action in an age of intangibles

As pletes its transition into the Age of Information, economists are struggling to identify the drivers and develop their predictive models accordingly. Alas, as businesses continue to grow and evolve more rapidly, and as the corresponding systems continue to increase plexity, many economists still view individuals and businesses as mostly static and reactionary. “Mainstream economists treat the firm as if it were an inorganic particle that does nothing but react to forces around it,” writes economist Arnold Kling in National...

Hurricanes lead to broken windows—and broken window fallacies

Hurricanes always leave two things in their aftermath: broken windows and articles endorsing the broken window fallacy. As economist Don Boudreaux wrote six years ago, “Americans will soon be flooded mentary that assures us that the silver lining around the destruction caused by hurricane Sandy is a stronger economy. Such nonsense always follows natural disasters.”The Atlantic, wanting to get a jump on being wrong, published an article that same day arguing that Hurricane Sandy would “stimulate the economy” in two...

Stiglitz vs. Easterly: Leading economists debate the role of markets in reducing poverty

In a fascinating debate hosted by Reason Magazine, development economists William Easterly and Joseph Stiglitz discuss how to best fight global poverty, responding to a simple question: “Which is a better approach, freer markets or increased government action?” Easterly, a professor at New York University and author of the popular book, The White Man’s Burden, highlights the importance of freer markets, arguing they provide better incentives, better mechanisms for sharing knowledge, and, most importantly, better rights. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate...

Look to the Dutch for true educational pluralism

“During the seven-decade political struggle in the Netherlands to allow parents to select schools corresponding to their religious convictions, Abraham Kuyper articulated a concept of “sphere sovereignty” that translates, in policy terms, into principled structural pluralism,” says Charles L. Glenn in this week’s Acton Commentary. “That Dutch experience, and its resolution in the “Pacification” of 1917, is highly relevant for the present situation in the United States.” Popular schooling is often a primary focal-point for attempts to make effective the...

5 Facts about hurricanes

Hurricane Florence has struck the Carolinas, dumping massive amounts of rain that could trigger catastrophic floods inland. Here are five facts you should know about these types of deadly storms: 1. A hurricane is a form of tropical storm that form over warm ocean waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, Caribbean Sea, southern Atlantic Ocean, and Gulf of Mexico. When the winds of a tropical storm are less than 38 mph, it is called a tropical depression, and when the...

How Trump’s tariffs hurt Michigan industry

“President Donald Trump’s continued embrace of tariffs spells danger for Michigan,” says Tyler Groenendal in an op-ed for the Detroit Times. Groenendal, the foundation relations coordinator at the Acton Institute, says though Trump is noted for his “America First” refrain, his call for tariffs will ultimately hurt America the most: Michigan is particularly vulnerable to the consequences of protectionism. According to estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau of Economic Analysis, imports and exports accounted for 38.9 percent of the Michigan’s...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Jul 1, 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...

Jul 1, 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...

Jul 1, 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...

Jul 1, 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...

Jul 1, 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....

Jul 1, 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...

Jul 1, 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,...

Jul 1, 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...

Jul 1, 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...

Jul 1, 2026