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...

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....

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...

I have been working as part of the Moral Markets project for the past couple of years, and as the formal end of the project looms, some of the outputs of the project ing to fruition. This includes a recent article that I co-authored, “The Moral Status of Wealth Creation in Early-Modern Reformed Confessions.” This piece appears as part of a special issue of Reformation & Renaissance Review co-edited by Wim Decock and Andrew M. McGinnis on the theme, “Interconfessional...

In a new piece published at The Catholic World Report, Acton’s Samuel Gregg reviews “Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France,” by Bronwen McShea, Associate Research Scholar with Princeton University’s James Madison Program. In “Apostles of Empire,” McShea details the history of Jesuit missionary efforts that took place in North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and brings attention to how the Jesuits’ missionary efforts were coupled with the advancement of French political and economic ambitions. Gregg writes:...

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...

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...

In this week’s Acton Commentary, Victor Claar looks at the work of the three economists awardedthe 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences. Claar, associate professor of economics at Florida Gulf Coast University and an Acton affiliate scholar, says “economists are quite divided on this year’s prize” given to Abhijit Banerjee,Esther DufloandMichael Kremer. As an economist I can tell you that we adore unexpected, counterintuitive results like the ones for textbooks and meals. And researchers like Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer...

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has negotiated a new agreement to leave the European Union on October 31. A British observer, who has read the plan, says it embodies a significant improvement over the deal former PM Theresa May saw defeated thrice by historic margins in Parliament. “Overall, these improvements represent a real step in the direction of free trade and hence are to be ed,” writes Rev. Richard Turnbull, in a new essay written for the Acton Institute’s Religion...

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...