Religion | Religious News - www.mreligion.com

Video: Paul Bonicelli on Trump’s way forward after AHCA

Acton Institute Director of Programs and Education Paul Bonicellijoins host Liz Claman and columnist and pundit Ellis Henican on Fox Business Channel’s “Countdown to the Closing Bell” to discuss the way forward for President Trump after the failure of congressional Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare. You can view the full interview below. ...

Global cooperation does not imply global governance

Acton’s Director of Research, Samuel Gregg, recently addressed the myth of national sovereignty being a “relic of the past” and global governance being the singular solution for the West to move forward. In a new article for Public Discourse, he calls out recent reactions to global governance, namely Brexit, as long over-due and something to be expected in opposition to global governance that violates national sovereignty: Twenty sixteen was not a happy year for globalism. In different ways, Donald Trump’s...

Fed Chair: Unstable childhood makes it harder to succeed as an adult

Embed from Getty Images Children who grew up in poverty were twice as likely to struggle with financial challenges later in life, said Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen in a meeting last week. Yellen was referring to the results of a survey, to be released this spring, that reveals more than half of young people age 25 to 39 who reported that as children they worried over things like having enough food were currently facing financial challenges. “Young adults who...

What you should know about rent controls

Note: This is post #26 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. Rent controls are a type of price ceiling where the government regulates the amounts charged for rented housing. In this video by Marginal Revolution University, Alex Tabarrox shows how rent controls reduce the quality of housing and create shortages by reducing the supply of apartments available on the market. (If you find the pace of the videos too slow, I’d mend watching them at 1.5 to 2...

The future of work: Arthur Brooks on human dignity and ‘neededness’

Although unemployment continues to hover somewhere around 4.7 percent, the labor-force participation rate offers a grimmer outlook, falling from 67% in 2000 to 63% today. With the continued acceleration of globalization and automation, the future of work looks increasingly uncertain. The pains from the decline are widespread and diverse, and are particularly pronounced among men, as Nicholas Eberstadt outlines in his latest book, Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis. “Nearly one in six prime working age men has no paid...

Free trade is not anti-American

Is protectionism patriotic? The recent discussions about free trade and protectionism seems to suggest it is. If you love your country, you’ll protect its economy. In a new article from The Stream, Samuel Gregg, Acton’s director of research, examines the growing hostility of American conservatism towards free trade and explains why supporting free trade is actually patriotic. He says: Over the past four years, Americans have turned against free trade. A majority nowsee free trade as bad for America. The...

Explainer: What you should know about congressional caucuses

Wait, why should I care about this topic? Americans tend to view partisan politics as being mostly binary—between Republicans and Democrats. But within Congress there are also factions that shape legislative agendas and determine the laws that affect our daily lives. For example, it was primarily opposition by the Freedom Caucus (about 40 members) that stopped the Republican healthcare proposal, the American Health Care Act (AHCA), from being voted on. What is a congressional caucus? A caucus is a faction...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Mar 10, 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,...

Mar 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...

Mar 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...

Mar 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....

Mar 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...

Mar 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...

Mar 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...

Mar 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...

Mar 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...

Mar 10, 2026