Today in the United States is the federal holiday known as Washington’s Birthday (not “Presidents Day—see item #1). In honor of George Washington’s birthday, here are 5 things you should know about the day set aside for our America’s founding father. 1. Although some state and local governments and private businesses refer to today as President’s Day, the legal public holiday is designated as “Washington’s Birthday” in section 6103(a) of title 5 of the United States Code. The observance of...

On Catholic Online, Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse praised Pope Benedict XVI for his “deep understanding” of the Christian patrimony of Christendom. “The Christian foundation of culture should be self-evident to most, but in our post-Christian (and poorly catechized) age our historical memory has grown increasingly dim,” he said. Jacobse, a priest in Naples, Fla., and president of the American Orthodox Institute, also lauded the pope for his work at healing the East-West divide between Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox. “The...

This week, Istituto Acton Director Kishore Jayabalan joined Al Kresta of Ave Maria Radio to discuss the historic resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. The special broadcast featured Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J., founder of Ignatius Press, who did his doctoral dissertation under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Click on the audio link below to listen. [audio: ...

There is always much to discuss after a State of the Union address, and Tuesday’s speech is no different. Sam Gregg, Director of Research at the Acton Institute, shared his thoughts: “The overall theme of the address is that government is there to do stuff for you,” he said. “He starts out making remarks about America being a country that values free enterprise and rewards individual initiative…and yet he offers proposals for government intervention after intervention after intervention,… and there’s...

“You can be for markets without being against redistribution,” says Erik Angner, a philosophy professor at George Mason University. Angner argues that the Nobel-winning economist Friedrich Hayek offers an alternative to contemporary liberals and leftists on the one hand and conservatives and libertarians on the other. As Amanda Winkler notes, In a controversialPolitco op-ed published in 2012, Angner wrote that while Britain’s National Health System and the price-rigging elements of Obamacare violate Hayekian principles, creating an individual mandate and giving...

Some politicians are calling for new regulation and restrictions on firearms, but why and how does the Second Amendment strengthen liberty? In a thoughtful post at the Carolina Journal today, Troy Kickler offers this historical assessment: What did early jurists and mentators say regarding the Second Amendment? St. George Tucker in View of the Constitution of the United States (1803), the first mentary on the Constitution after its ratification, describes the Second Amendment to be “the true palladium of liberty.”...

In 2010, Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, who lived with their five children in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, were faced with a choice: abandon their Evangelical Christian religious beliefs or lose custody of their children. The Romeikes had withdrawn their children from German public schools in 2006, after ing concerned that the educational material employed by the school was undermining the tenets of their Christian faith. After accruing the equivalent of $10,000 worth of fines and the forcible removal of...

“Our world is overpopulated.” If you repeat something often enough, it es “truth”. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, warning that we’d all soon be fighting over food, space, and power as the earth sagged under the weight of all those darned people. He was wrong, of course, and not just wrong: spectacularly wrong. It didn’t keep him from being a celebrity or from his ridiculous notion from being believed. But he was still wrong. In What to...

Despite the inevitable flurry of trite sugary clichés and predictable consumerism, Valentine’s Day is as good an opportunity as any to reflect on the nature of human love and consider how we might further it in its truest, purest form across society. For those of us interested in the study of economics, or, if you prefer,the study of human action, what drives such action—love or otherwise—is the starting point for everything. For the Christian economist, such questions get a bit...

Over on the Huffington Post, Andreas Widmer, Acton’s Research Fellow in Entrepreneurship, suggests that Pope pleted the work of John Paul and then laid the groundwork for the New Evangelization but recognized that that project should be headed by someone else: Before we move on, we need to stop and reflect on what just happened — not just in the past seven years, but the last 70 years. Upon closer examination of the facts, observers will see that this was...