Today marks the day that the Acton Institute broadens its horizons… If you haven’t noticed, we’ve literally widened our blog to 900px, creating a bit more space for all the things we have to say. We’ve also changed the location of the blog to All of our old links ( should still work although there may be occasions when they won’t. Please don’t hesitate to leave notification of old links that don’t work in ments section of this post.Technorati Profile...

Picking up on the themes of the importance of narrative from recent weeks, I pass along this worthy saying of Lord Acton: “Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.” ...

New Haven, Conn., isn’t waiting for a green light from the federal government to solve its illegal immigration problem: Two weeks ago, it became the first city in America to issue its own ID card. Already considered a “sanctuary city,” as the latest issue of The Economist reports, New Haven has forbidden its police force to ask anything about immigrants’ status and offers illegals help with filing federal taxes. Now with the new ID card — good for all sorts...

Australian blogger Barney Zwartz, writing for the Australian newspaper The Age, tracks down intrepid research director Sam Gregg, who participated in a Melbourne book launching for Catholic Social Teaching and the Market Economy. After noting that “it seems counter-intuitive to me to consider market-theorist heroes such as Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan friends of the poor,” Zwartz asks: Is Dr Gregg right? Is a market economy the primary tool for addressing poverty, are other economic approaches better, or are there...

Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam provoked a cottage industry mentary and debate on the question of “social capital” when he published his book, Bowling Alone, a few years ago. Now he’s at it again with an intriguing study concerning the effects of diversity on civic life. The controversial finding is that the more diverse munity is, the lower its index of social connectedness (measured by volunteer rates, for example). The implications of the finding are significant for all sorts of issues,...

Mt. Tabor In much of the Christian world today, the great feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord memorated (Matt. 17:1-9). In the Eastern Church, as Fr. Seraphim Rose observed, it is customary to “offer fruits to be blessed at this feast; and this offering of thanksgiving to God contains a spiritual sign, too. Just as fruits ripen and are transformed under the action of the summer sun, so is man called to a spiritual transfiguration through the light of...

Readings in Social Ethics: Richard Baxter, How to Do Good to Many (London, 1682; repr. 1830), part 1 of 3. References below are to page numbers. On Good Works: A condemnation of selfishness: “It is a sign he is a branch cut off and withered who careth little for any but himself” (292).The orderliness of subsidiarity obligations: “But as all motion and action is first upon the nearest object, so must ours; and doing good must be in order: first...

Enthusiastic atheists are on the offensive in an effort to tear down private faith, now that religion has increasingly lost influence in the public square. Richard Dawkins, author of “The God Delusion”, and Christopher Hitchens’s, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” have sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The reason for this attack is because the atheists claim to mitted to justice, while people of faith, along with the divine itself, are and have been purveyors of injustice,...