As an evangelical who is extremely sympathetic to natural law theorizing, I’ve struggled with a question that I’ve never found anyone address: Why aren’t natural law arguments more persuasive? We evangelicals are nothing if not pragmatic. If we were able to recognize the utility and effectiveness of such arguments, we’d likely to be much more open to natural law theory. But conclusions based on natural law don’t seem to be all that useful pelling those who are unconvinced. Indeed, not...

Several years ago, the Catholic intellectual Joseph Bottom observed that American literature has entailed a substitution of geography for heroes in our moral vocabulary.” In other words, we don’t have many heroic types in American literature. What we have instead is heroic geography. The Virginian, the Down Easterner, the Texas Ranger, the cowboy, the Hoosier, the hillbilly, the Okie. These are tropes that serve the moral function filled in other cultures and other literatures primarily by heroes. And these geographical...

“Why not dictate that every employee earn several hundred thousand dollars a year?” asks Hunter Baker in this week’s Acton Commentary, “We could end every social problem with nothing more than political will.” During a recent visit to Twitter, I happened across a post from a noted Christian academic. He posed the kind of pithy remark which is tailor-made to launch a hundred admiring retweets. Paraphrasing slightly, it was something like this: “Conservatives, don’t talk to me about family values...

Related to some recent discussions about the market for Christmas trees, an mercial aspect of the holiday, I ran across this delightful post about a little-known poem by T.S. Eliot, “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees.” In this piece, Eliot introduces the Christmas tree as a source of wonder for children, a source which can be cultivated into maturity so that at the end of times the fullness of the Christmas message might be harvested. As Maria Popova introduces the verses,...

In a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal, Emory economics professor Paul H. Rubin makes an interesting argument about the way economists tend to over-elevate and/or misconstrue the role petition in the flourishing of markets. “Competition plays a supporting role,” he argues, but “cooperation makes markets thrive”: The way we use the petition instead of cooperation fosters anti-market bias. “Competition” carries a negative connotation because it implies winners and losers, and our minds naturally feel sympathy for the losers....

2013 certainly had its fair share of religion in the news. Despite the fact that most major news sources know little-to-nothing about religion, they still report on it with gusto. Jeremy Lott, editor-in-chief at RealClearPolitics has put together a list of the top 14 religion news stories of the past year. (You can read them all here.) Here are some highlights: The Tale of Two Popes. Pope Benedict XVI shocked the world by abdicating, and the election of Cardinal Jorge...

In this mentary, I examine the link between delayed gratification and civilization. I use the image of children waking up on Christmas morning to a cornucopia of presents under the tree. But for many this year, the delivery of presents was delayed. Ray Hennessey writes over atEntrepreneur that our consumption habits and expectations, which exemplify an ethic of instant gratification, have a lot to do with delivery failure. As he writes, there is plenty of blame to go around, but...

Manila Auxiliary Bishop Broderick Pabillo, the convenor of the Philippines’ Interfaith Movement Against Human Trafficking, is expressing increased concern about human trafficking due to the “chaotic environment” brought about by typhoon Haiyan. Internal trafficking has long been a concern in the Philippines, for men, women and children. According to HumanTrafficking.org, People are trafficked from rural areas to urban centers including Manila, Cebu, the city of Angeles, and increasingly to cities in Mindanao, as well as within urban areas. Men are...

Writing in The Detroit News, Rev. Robert A. Sirico looks at Pope Francis’ recent Apostolic Exhortation, the “much talked about, but little-read” document titled “The Joy of the Gospel” with a special emphasis on how the pontiff understands the problem of poverty. The president and co-founder of the Acton Institute notes how Francis “speaks boldly through effective and moving gestures.” Excerpt: It is no surprise that the man who took as his model and name the model of il poverello...

At the beginning of 2013, piled a list that included 1,034 predictions for ing year. I later went through and narrowed it down to the top 500 that I was absolutely certain would happen. Even after cutting the list down, though, I only managed to achieve a 67% accuracy rate. (Unfortunately, I forgot to post that list in public so it is difficult to verify. You’ll just have to take my word for it.) This year, in an attempt to...