When es to the presidency, there are times when historians find the need to reevaluate a president. Often it is because of a crisis, war, or other current events. I can think of no other president that needs to be reassessed more than Calvin Coolidge. Thankfully, Amity Shlaes has written a new biography of Coolidge that will be available next month. Coolidge preceded a progressive era and fought not just to shrink government, which he did successfully, but harnessed the...

Albert Hahn: Dr. Kuyper's care for the little people (1905)In yesterday’s post I highlighted a pair of articles that cover the transition over the last 120 years or so in the Netherlands from an emphasis on private charitable giving to reliance upon the welfare state. In some ways this story mirrors a similar transformation in American society as described by Marvin Olasky in his landmark book, The Tragedy of American Compassion. Olasky’s work does double-duty, however, not only chronicling this...

Rev. Robert A. Sirico, President of the Acton Institute, was in Overland Park, Kansas on April 27th to address an audience of local Acton friends and supporters. His topic was “The Moral Adventure of the Free Society.” For those who attended and would like to listen again, or for those who weren’t able to be there personally, the audio of his address is available via the audio player below. [audio: ...

For Christians giving is not about equations and intensives, says Peter Heslam, it’s about a spontaneous response to the grace of a lavishly generous God: In Cape Town in 2010, this response inspired the launch of a campaign to encourage a global culture of Christian generosity. The Global Generosity Network is now establishing resources and local networks, helped by leading entrepreneurs. Such entrepreneurs understand that wealth distribution relies on wealth creation – their business thinking and practical skills generates wealth...

France elected a new president yesterday, the socialist Francois Hollande who has vowed to rein in “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism and dramatically raise taxes on the “rich.” Voters turned out Nicholas Sarkozy, the flamboyant conservative whose five-year term was undermined by Europe’s economic crisis, his paparazzi-worthy lifestyle and bative personality. But Sarkozy’s defeat exposes “a crisis of identity and purpose that presently afflicts much of Europe’s center-right,” according to Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg in a new analysis on The American Spectator....

Novelist Stephen King recently added his voice to the chorus of superrich clamoring to be taxed more. He knows his critics will call for him to “Cut a check and shut up,” but King says he’s not going to be keep quiet. He believes he and other uberwealthy citizens have a moral imperative to pay more. Clive Cook has a solution that should satisfy both sides of the issue. As Cook says, “it’s childishly simple once you recognize that two...

Current debates surrounding the U.S. federal budget have turned the spotlight on subsidiarity, solidarity and mon good, all aspects of Catholic social teaching. In an article by the Catholic News Service’s Dennis Sadowski, Acton research fellow and director of media Michael Matheson Miller said, “The principles are there. They are to guide us and we are to pay attention to them. You have to affirm those principles. Where Catholics are going to disagree is in the prudential implementation of them.”...

On May 15, Socialist Francois Hollande will be sworn in as France’s new President following elections this past weekend. According to Vatican Radio, Hollande is vowing to overturn many of current President’s Sarkozy’s economic reforms, in an attempt to relieve France’s current debt crisis. One of Hollande’s goals is to increase taxation on millionaires to 75 percent. With more than a quarter of a million French citizens already working in London, this type of heavy taxation may cause an exodus...

Review of The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, by Jonah Goldberg, (New York, NY: Sentinel, 2012) With proper training, and maybe a bit of experience on the debate team, it’s easy to recognize logical fallacies in an opponent’s argument. When es to popular give and take, the sort of thing we have so much of now on opinion websites and news channels, there hasn’t been decent preparation for arguments outside the columns and blog...

Each year tens of thousands of mostly underdressed people spend weeks hanging out in the Nevada desert in an “annual experiment in munity dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance.” If you’re like me, the first thing es to mind when you hear about the Burning Man festival is . . . hippies. Lots and lots of hippies. But Burning Man isn’t a hippie festival. (Really, it’s not.) In fact, underneath it all, says the festival’s co-founder, Larry Harvey, is...