“If we want to be coherent when addressing poverty,” writes Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg at Public Discourse, “our concerns can’t be rooted in emotivist or relativistic accounts of who human beings are. They must be founded on recognition of each person’s freedom, rationality, and dignity.” In social sciences such as economics, positivism’s ongoing influence encourages the tendency to see values as irrelevant, hopelessly subjective, and hard to measure (which, for some people, means they don’t exist). Thus, making the...

Tuesday, December 2 marks the final Acton Lecture Series for 2014. Acton es William Allen, Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science and Emeritus Dean, James Madison College, at Michigan State University. Allen will be speaking on “American National Character and the Future of Liberty,” beginning at 11:30 at 98 E. Fulton, Grand Rapids, Michigan. You can register here. Allen spoke (along with Samuel Gregg, Acton’s Director of Research) in 2008 on “What Is Freedom?” as...

For most of my life I was, at 5-foot-10, of exactly average height. But in the span of one day in 1989 I became freakishly tall. While I hadn’t grown an inch upward, I had moved 6,000 miles eastward to Okinawa, Japan. Since the average height of native Okinawans was only 5-foot-2, I towered over most every native islander by 8 inches. It was the equivalent of being 6-foot-6 in the United States. Unfortunately, when I would leave the towns...

Are you creative? No, that’s not one of those silly Facebook quizzes; it’s a serious question. Would you describe yourself as “creative?” Turns out, that’s a pretty important question. Folks who study such things say that “creativity” is one of the things employers are looking for in today’s workforce, and not just in places like Silicon Valley. While we value creativity in our culture, it seems as if we’re quashing it in our kids: Common Core doesn’t exactly call for...

I would like to clarify that inequity and inequality are overlapping (and related) but not identical sets. Here’s a diagram that might be helpful. The way these terms often get used makes it seem like this distinction could provide some clarity. See also “the generally accepted formal equality principle that Aristotle formulated in reference to Plato: ‘treat like cases as like.'” ...

The practice of speculation draws mixed reactions among Christians, as some believe it is intrinsically evil and others see great ing from it. Over at Legatus Magazine, Acton’s Director of Research, Samuel Gregg, hopes to shed some light on whether or not Christians should engage in speculation. The Roman Catholic Catechism condemns specific types of speculation, but Gregg argues that the practice could be justified in other situations not addressed by the Catechism. However, before Christians accept or reject it,...

Tomorrow is the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, memoration of thedate of the adoption, by the General Assembly, of the United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (resolution 317(IV) of 2 December 1949). As part of the effort to help eradicate modern slavery and human trafficking across the world by 2020,Catholic, Anglican, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, and Orthodox leaders will gather at the Vaticantomorrow to...

Pope Francis spoke to members of the European Parliament on November 25. The focus of his speech was “dignity:” specifically the transcendent dignity of the human person. He reminded his audience that the protection of dignity was key to rebuilding Europe following World War II, but now, the pope says, ” there are still too many situations in which human beings are treated as objects whose conception, configuration and utility can be programmed, and who can then be discarded when...