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Audio: Sirico on Pope Francis, the Media, and the Future of The Catholic Church

Last week, the first major interview with Pope Francis was released to the world via a number of Jesuit journals; you can read the interview for yourself at America Magazine. As usually happens, major media outlets reported on the interview, often putting their own spin on it (the New York Times provides an example of this type of coverage here). This morning, Frank Beckmann of Detroit, Michigan’s WJR Radiocalled upon Acton President Rev. Robert A. Sirico to discuss what the...

A Confederacy of IRS Dunces

A few months ago I wrote about how when I was a young Marine I learned that when manding officer says, “I wish” or “I desire,” these expressions have the force of a direct order and should be acted upon as if they had given a direct order. If our CO were to say, even in musing to themselves, “I wish there was something that could be done about that,” we knew we should jump into action. The main problem...

Even in Prison There is Dignity in Work

In a program at Colorado’s Crowley County Correctional Facility, prisoners hand-make roof trusses and oak cabinets for use in Habitat For Humanity home. The inmates not only learn carpentry skills but the dignity of work: “For me, personally, having that apprenticeship was priceless,” said Mike Voss. He learned carpentry when he served time at Crowley and now, five years after being hired as a benchman carpenter, is a co-owner of Artisan Cabinetry in Denver. “Everything I’d done in the past...

Hours Cut Due To Obamacare? Follow Your Passion, Says Pelosi

According to Investor’s Business Daily, over 300 businesses are cutting employee hours and jobs to avoid Obamacare. If employers restrict employee work hours to 30 per week, then they avoid Obamacare mandates for health insurance. Jed Graham of Investor’s Business Daily says, “Data also point to a record low workweek in low-wage industries.” Casinos are one industry that exemply these cuts. In Grantville, Penn., the Hollywood Casino has told part-time workers they are now limited to no more than 30...

Audio: Tea Party Catholic Heads to the Heartland

Samuel Gregg, Acton’s Director of Research, continues to promote his fine new bookTea Party Catholic: The Catholic Case for Limited Government, a Free Economy and Human Flourishing via radio interviews all across the country. Today, Sam spoke with Jan Mickelson on Des Moines, Iowa’s 50,000 watt WHO Radio. It was a fine conversation, with Mickelson calling the book “a spirited read,” well worth your time. To pick up a copy of your own, head over to the book’s website. Listen...

Multiple Companies Changing Insurance Plans Due To Obamacare

With Obamacare (the Affordable Health Care Act) set to begin on October 1, panies are changing their employee health care. For some, it’s a change in what benefits employees will receive; for others, employees will be losing health care all together and told to sign up under Obamacare. The Wall Street Journal did a “round-up” panies who’ve announced changes. Walgreens is the largest employer yet to disclose employee health care changes. [T]he drugstore giant disclosed a plan to provide payments...

Dear Millennials: Get Over Yourselves and Get to Work

This is a guest post by Michael Hendrix in response to the recent debate sparked by a provocative poston millennials and Gen Y “yuppie culture.” Michael serves as the director for emerging issues and research at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of the University of St. Andrews and a Texas native. By Michael Hendrix Over the past few weeks, much has been written on GYPSY unicorns and my generation’s dashed hopes (warning: strong...

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,...

Nov 10, 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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 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...

Nov 10, 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 10, 2026