Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Acton Line podcast: Rev. Robert Sirico on the church’s response to COVID-19
Acton Line podcast: Rev. Robert Sirico on the church’s response to COVID-19
Dec 13, 2025 2:32 AM

As the United States continues to wrestle with the fallout of COVID-19, many people are falling back on their faith and the church for peace. Many churches have decided to hold services online, and local governments have also stepped in and put parameters around church attendance to help mitigate the spread of the virus. Some actions taken by local governments have been appropriate, but some others leave us wondering if the government has overstepped. How can we tell the difference between measured responses and overreaches, and what should the role of the church be during these times? What has the church’s response to pandemics looked like in the past? Acton’s President and co-founder, Rev. Robert Sirico explains.

Read: “When Priests Aren’t Allowed To Give Last Rites,” by Rev. Robert Sirico

Watch: Rev. Sirico: The dangers of accepting government money, even in a crisis

Read: Cooperation, Coercion, and the Coronavirus

Read: What Do Christians Do in a Plague?

New to the Acton Line podcast? Subscribe here! We also mend starting with these episodes:

Do you have feedback for the Acton Line podcast team? We want to hear from you! Email us at [email protected]. If you like Acton Line, don’t forget to leave a rating and review on the Apple podcast app!

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Rev. Richard Turnbull: Parliament’s moral failure on Brexit
UK Parliament has twice denied Prime Minister Boris Johnson a vote on a Brexit deal favored by the majority of British citizens. The latest efforts to delay Brexit have created “a modern moral crisis in one of the world’s foremost democratic nations,” writes Rev. Richard Turnbull, director of the Centre for Enterprise, Markets, and Ethics (CEME) in Oxford. Turnbull chronicles the head-spinning events that have taken place in Westminster since Parliament’s rare Saturday session in a new article for he...
Celebrating ‘intrapreneurship’: The power of employee-innovators
In our pursuit of economic prosperity and progress, we tend to focus heavily on the role of the entrepreneur—and rightly so. Many of the world’s most transformative discoveries e from people willing to take significant risks and endure painful sacrifices to bring new enterprises to life. When es to our theology of work, our focus tends toward much of the same. Indeed, from a Christian perspective, the call of the entrepreneur provides a uniquely vivid example of how our economic...
Alejandro Chafuen in Forbes: Young Europeans’ views of totalitarianism
Alejandro Chafuen, Acton’s Managing Director, International, wrote recently in Forbes to give his thoughts on a recent survey that examined young Europeans’ attitudes toward various strains of totalitarianism. Attitudes in different countries vary, of course, and – unsurprisingly munism is viewed more favorably in countries that were never behind the Iron Curtain than in many eastern ones where the historical memory of it lives on. I have been reading most of the fundraising appeals sent out by think tanks and...
Drucker on private property and the modern corporation
This is the sixth in a series of essays on Peter Drucker’s early works. Peter Drucker recognized the revolutionary aspect of the corporate form. The older corporations wielded something close to sovereign authority as they essentially ruled the territory wherever they traded and planted. Other corporations followed by exploiting natural monopolies such as bridges and utilities. But the new corporation, the corporation of the modern era, is a different sort of thing. Modern corporations arise when individuals delegate their private...
Acton Line podcast: The morality of ‘Joker’; How Clarence Thomas is changing SCOTUS
The new super villain drama ‘Joker’ has shattered box office records and gained much controversial media attention along the way. Set to top $900 million worldwide, the dark film from director Todd Phillips and actor Joaquin Phoenix is already being heralded as the biggest R-rated movie ever. So why has ‘Joker’ been such a hit? Christian Toto, award winning movie critic and editor at Hollywood in Toto, breaks it down, explaining how the film touches on themes like mental illness,...
Video: Andrew Klavan on reintroducing our culture to the truth
On October 15th, the Acton Institute celebrated its 29th anniversary with a dinner at the J.W. Marriott hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The keynote address for the evening was delivered by Andrew Klavan, the award-winning author and screenwriter. Klavan shared the story of his journey from atheism to faith in Jesus Christ, and laid out his views on how to reach out to a culture that has largely abandoned not only Biblical truth, but the very idea of truth itself....
How leftist populism is crushing freedom in Bolivia
As we’ve seen in countries like Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua, Latin American left-leaning populists are quite content to work in democratic systems—until, that is, those systems start delivering results which they don’t like. The same dynamic is now unfolding in another Latin American country. Evo Morales has been President of Bolivia since 2006. A strong admirer of the late Hugo Chavez, Morales stood for a fourth five-year term on 20 October, having unilaterally abolished term-limits, despite voters rejecting his bid...
Why you’re richer than you think (and Jeff Bezos is poorer)
One of the most plaints against capitalism holds that real wages have stagnated since the 1970s. Meanwhile, CEOs such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos earn more money than ever. The charge surfaced as recently as the fourth Democratic presidential debate, last Tuesday. “As a result of taking away the rights of working people and organized labor, people haven’t had a raise – 90 percent of Americans have not had a raise for 40 years,” said Tom Steyer (whose earnings rank somewhat...
Adam Smith and a life well-lived
Over at Law & Liberty I had the pleasure of reviewing Ryan Patrick Hanley’s new book, Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life. I highly mend it: Ryan Patrick Hanley’s latest book offers an accessible, erudite, and concise introduction to Adam Smith in full, the moral philosopher of wisdom and prudence. In Our Great Purpose, Hanley eschews the extensive reference apparatus and jargon that is so characteristic of contemporary scholarship. Instead, Hanley has taken an approach that...
Ginsburg and Hale: Creating new laws from the bench
In a mentary, Trey Dimsdale looks at winsome celebrity jurists Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Brenda Hale, heroines of the left wing project to change how constitutional law is understood in the United States and the United Kingdom. The careers of these jurists raise questions about the proper role of those who sit on the bench, Dimsdale writes. The approach adopted by Hale and Ginsburg should be viewed with skepticism rather than celebration. Of course, injustice may be reflected in a...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved