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Rev. Sirico: Pope Francis’s Love Letter to the Family

“What the pope has brought forth is honest, timely and sensitive,” writes Rev. Robert A. Sirico, co-founder and president of the Acton Institute. “Amoris Laetitia explores plicated pastoral situations that any confessor will know all too well: challenges of how weak and fallen people can authentically live the faith.” In the Detroit News, Rev. Sirico discusses Pope Francis’s love letter to the family: The pope’s reflections are aimed at how to make a solid moral discernment in the midst of...

Leftist Shareholders Attack Corporate Free Speech

On its website, Trinity Health trumpets its shareholder activism. Based in Livonia, Mich., the Catholic health care provider boasts operations in 21 states, which includes 90 hospitals and 120 long-term care facilities. For this last, Trinity should be lauded. For the first, however, your writer is left shaking his head. Among Trinity’s list of five shareholder advocacy priorities, two stand out: • uphold the dignity of the human person. • enable access to health care. In other words, issues any...

A Papal Revolution

This year marks the 125th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum and the beginning of the modern Catholic social encyclical tradition. In this landmark text, Leo courageously set out to examine the “new things” of his time, especially the changes associated with the Industrial Revolution. These included the emergence of an urbanized working class, the breakdown of old social hierarchies, and the rise of capitalism as well as ideologies such as socialism, munism, and corporatism. On April 20,...

Tesla Motors Releases a Car for the Masses That Runs on Coal

Electric cars are not a new invention, nor are they as popular as they once were. (They debuted in 1890 and by 1900 electric cars accounted for around a third of all vehicles on the road.) But over the past decade, thanks to Elon Musk and Tesla Motors, electric cars have e much more interesting. Tesla rolled out the first fully electric sports car in 2008 and a fully electric luxury sedan in 2012. And earlier this month they unveiled...

A Policy Solution to Fix Inequality and Boost GDP

Andrew Biggs of AEI has a piece up today at Forbes addressing the gender pay gap and provides a neat solution: “forbid women from staying at home with their children.” As Biggs points out, such a policy would address perhaps the greatest root cause of gender pay inequality: varied work experience attributable to choices women make. “Most mothers who stay at home or work only part-time are doing what they wish to do and what they view as best for...

Roundup: Samuel Gregg on Pope Francis and Overpopulation, Pope Leo XIII and Modernity, and Constitutional Conservatism

New articles from the indefatigable Samuel Gregg, research director of the Acton Insitute: Amoris Laetitia: Another Nail in the “Overpopulation” Coffin, The Catholic World Report Here the pope signals his awareness of the efforts of various organizations—the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the EU, particular US administrations—to push anti-natalist policies upon developing nations. A Revolutionary Pope for Revolutionary Times, Crisis Magazine Between 1878 and 1903, Leo issued an astonishing 85 encyclicals. Many dealt squarely with the political, social, and...

Money and Moral Absolutes

In medieval Europe merchants would often writeDeus enim et proficuum (“For God and Profit”) in the upper corners of their accounting ledgersorA nome di Dio e guadangnio (“In the Name of God and Profit”) on partnership contracts. These words reflected their authors’ conviction that banking and finance were economically useful endeavors,saysSamuel Greggin this week’s Acton Commentary. Luis Molina and the many other Christians who explored these areas throughout history were not searching for greater marketplace efficiencies. Their concern was moral....

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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....

May 28, 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...

May 28, 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...

May 28, 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...

May 28, 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...

May 28, 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...

May 28, 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...

May 28, 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,...

May 28, 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...

May 28, 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...

May 28, 2026