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Entrepreneurs, to be truly successful, must know more than basic economics. They must also have a higher purpose, one not reducible to mere productivity. Read More… There is much in the classical liberal economist that I find attractive. By classical liberal, I do not mean the sort of political liberalism that defaults to certain presumptions of big government. Rather, I mean one who adheres to a more libertarian adoption of free market principles. Yet the classical liberal economist without faith...

Pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai found guilty over Tiananmen Square Massacre vigil

Lai and two co-defendants were convicted on charges related to their participation in the annual Tiananmen Square Massacre vigil, another Beijing-inspired blow to free speech and free assembly in Hong Kong. Read More… Hong Kong media tycoon and outspoken pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai has been convicted for his involvement in a memorating the Tiananmen Square Massacre. On Dec. 9, Lai, along with two other prominent Hong Kong activists, Gwyneth Ho and Chow Hang Tung, were found guilty of incitement and...

When bookshops were miraculous, romantic places

Not even Amazon can put the original “Shop Around the Corner” out of business. Now, as for the remake … Read More… I began a series of essays on Christmas movies last week with The Bishop’s Wife (1947), a story about church, munity of the faithful, and spiritual responsibility. This week, I’m writing about a less lofty subject, munity of the workplace and the life merce, but a much better movie, The Shop Around the Corner (1940), one of the...

The social responsibility of business is still to its business

Do corporations have an obligation to address the needs of the larger society? Or was Milton Friedman right, that their only clear obligation is to their shareholders? Read More… Most people have intuitions about moral issues of consequence, but we often find it difficult to put these intuitions into words. Something seems to us to be right or wrong, but we struggle to express our ideas accurately and to explain why our intuitions are reasonable pelling. As Peter Drucker used...

Christmas 1991: The birth of freedom in the death of the evil empire

Whether the work of Providence, a pope and a president, or the inner contradictions of a bankrupt ideology, the collapse of the USSR meant hope of a free and democratic Russia. Has that hope been fulfilled? Read More… “You can have a very quiet Christmas evening,” wished Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to American President George H. W. Bush. “I am saying good-bye and shaking your hand.” It was a long-distance handshake, done via telephone. And it came on Christmas Day,...

China and Russia don’t know why they were excluded from the “Summit for Democracy”

Should you tell them or should I? Read More… Presidential summits tend to focus on PR rather than substance. The Biden administration’s “Summit for Democracy” looks no different. Its objectives were worthy. Asthe State Departmentexplained it, President Joe Biden planned to “bring together leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.” However, most of the topics probably...

What the Kyle Rittenhouse trial taught America about assumptions, keeping peace

While questions of police brutality, persistent racism and criminal justice reform should concern all citizens, we must realize that violence and disorder provide no path to a more just future. Read More… On Nov. 19, Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all charges related to the fatal shooting of two men and the wounding of another on the third day of widespread rioting and civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August last year. The trial had for many Americans...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Aug 6, 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...

Aug 6, 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...

Aug 6, 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...

Aug 6, 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...

Aug 6, 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....

Aug 6, 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...

Aug 6, 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...

Aug 6, 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,...

Aug 6, 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...

Aug 6, 2026