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The moral threat of measuring the ‘pay gap’

The “ethnic pay gap” in the UK has been estimated at £3.2 billion ($4.2 billion U.S.), or nearly $200 a week. To rectify this, 15 major employers– including the Bank of England, Deloitte UK, and Citibank UK – have agreed (after nudging from the Conservative government) to publish their ethnic pay figures. But Philip Booth warns that these figures are misleading and will harm those they intend to help, in a new essay for Acton’s Religion & Liberty Transatlantic website....

Christian action in God’s world

This week’s Acton Commentary is adapted from a foreword to a new volume by Acton research fellow Anthony B. Bradley, Faith in Society: 13 Profiles of Christians Adding Value to the Modern World. The focus of this book is on Christians who are working out of their faith convictions in the world, not only in the context of secular institutions and environments, but especially in institutions that are animated by Christian values and identity. In this Abraham Kuyper stands as...

80% of the globe is ‘religious restricted’: UN hearing

Freedom of religion is denied in much of the world, according to the U.S. ambassador for religious freedom. And a United mittee of NGOs dedicated to religious liberty has called the UN to protect the most fundamental freedom. “Eighty percent of the world’s population lives in a religiously restricted atmosphere,” Sam Brownback told mittee. “Eighty percent of the world is religious. How can we tolerate this continuing situation?” He recounted harrowing tales of persecution that he had personally witnessed, especially...

Acton Line: Rev. Robert Sirico on the reality of socialism; Interview with a Venezuelan dissident

On this episode of Acton Line, Acton’s co-founder and president, Rev. Robert Sirico, sits down with Acton’s associate researcher and librarian, Dan Hugger, to discuss the realities of socialism seen specifically in Nicaragua and Venezuela. After that, a redux segment is re-released, featuring 2018 summer intern and student at Grove City College, Noah Gould, who speaks with Javier Avila about inflation, unrest and hope in Venezuela. Check out these additional resources on this week’s podcast topics: Read “The Sandinistas’ faithful...

7 Figures: National Academies report on child poverty

In a massive new599-page study, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Board on Children, Youth, and Families produced a report on the costs of child poverty in the United States and the effectiveness of current efforts aimed at reducing poverty. Here are seven figures from the report you should know: 1. In 2015, the latest year for which estimates were available, more than 9.6 million U.S. children (13.0 per cent) lived in families with annual es below a...

Tyler Cowen finds economic answers in ‘Genesis’

Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and all around internet impresario, has a new column up at Bloomberg on his recent rereading of the Book of Genesis, Living standards rise throughout the book, and by the end we see the marvels of Egyptiancivilization, as experienced and advised by Joseph. The Egyptians have advanced markets in grain, and the logistical and administrative capacities to store grain for up to seven years, helping them to e famine risk (for...

Game of Theories: The Keynesians

Note: This is post #113 in a weekly video series on basic economics. “One point of contention among economists is the causes of business cycles and recessions,” says economist Tyler Cowen. “And if you disagree on the causes, chances are that you disagree on the solutions.” In this next section from the Marginal Revolution University video series, we’ll look at some of the major business cycle theories—Keynesian, Monetarist, Real Business Cycle, and Austrian—and what their proponents think we ought to...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Oct 16, 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....

Oct 16, 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...

Oct 16, 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...

Oct 16, 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...

Oct 16, 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...

Oct 16, 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...

Oct 16, 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,...

Oct 16, 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...

Oct 16, 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...

Oct 16, 2026