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Acton Line podcast: Why the ‘1619 Project’ is a lie; Yes, we’ve tried ‘real socialism’

In August, the New York Times launched the ‘1619 Project,’ an initiative that includes school curriculum, videos, and a podcast, which aims to “reframe” the history of America’s founding around slavery. The Times claims that since the year 1619, “[n]o aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed.” So what is the Times trying to plish with the ‘1619 Project’? Ismael Hernandez, founder and director of the Freedom &...

The Jacobins’ manifesto: ‘The Socialist Manifesto’ by Bhaskar Sunkara

“If you are a socialist, and you are toying with the idea of writing a book – now is the time to do so,” writes Kristian Niemietz. “There seems to be an infinite demand for this message right now,” he states in a new book review posted atReligion & Liberty Transatlanticat the author’s request. Niemietz, the head of political economy at the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), reviews The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era...

Rev. Ben Johnson at Natl Catholic Register: Praying to the true ‘King of Israel’

The week after Donald Trump tweeted a message proclaiming himself the ing of God,” I decided to say a prayer to the “King of Israel” (although quietly, since my bishop encouraged me to pray so softly that no parishioner would hear me). I am assured that literally thousands of priests in this country have joined me in standing before our altars and whispering an identical prayer, using the same moniker. This is not a confession of idolatry nor an insider’s...

Fact check: Did the wealth tax increase the number of millionaires?

“If you want less of something, tax it,” the old adage goes. If that is the case, why is a prominent European newspaper reporting that the number of millionaires increased after one nation introduced a wealth tax? “Number of super-rich in Spain grows 74% since reintroduction of wealth tax,” a headline in Spain’sEl Paisreportedrecently. Here are the facts: Background Spain introduced a wealth tax (Patrimonio) in 1977 as a “temporary” measure. In 1991, lawmakers admitted the 14-year-old tax would be...

Samuel Gregg on ‘The specter of scientism’

In this week’s Acton Commentary, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg looks at how “scientism” treats the scientific method as the only way of knowing anything and everything. Without dismissing the real achievements of modern science, he notes that “one side-effect of these triumphs was that some began treating the empirical sciences as the only form of true reason and the primary way to discern true knowledge … ” Notwithstanding these serious flaws with scientism, its acceptance has two effects on...

The problem with intellectuals

I am in the curious position of being a blogger who distrusts opinions. The late yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar put it best when he wrote, “An opinion is yesterday’s right or wrong knowledge warmed up and re-served for today’s situation.” Too often opinion is divorced from both personal experience and rigorous thought. F.A. Hayek’s essay “The Intellectuals and Socialism” is an attempt at defining the nature and function of professional opinion-havers. His description of them as, “second hand dealers in...

China replaces Ten Commandments with socialist propaganda: Report

Congregations in China’s officially recognized Protestant church have been forced to replace mandments to Moses with a quotation about the triumph of socialism, according to a religious liberty watchdog. The action literally substitutes socialism as an idol, in violation of the First Commandment.The Chinese government’s attempt to change the teachings of the60,000-church Three-Self Patriotic Movement unmasks how socialism crushesreligious liberty and reduces Christians to subservience – or elevates them to martyrdom. The magazineBitter Harvestreports: The Ten Commandments are the basis...

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...

Apr 20, 2025

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...

Apr 20, 2025

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...

Apr 20, 2025

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...

Apr 20, 2025

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...

Apr 20, 2025

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...

Apr 20, 2025

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....

Apr 20, 2025

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...

Apr 20, 2025

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...

Apr 20, 2025

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,...

Apr 20, 2025