Since the publication of the encyclical Laudato Si by Francis, a long-unheard rumble has been growing across the world public opinion. He is an expert in making himself heard, so we might as well rest it as it is, because Francis would be pleased. Our readers, however, are used to our fixing troubles, so we will once again meet the subjective claim of the market. The Laudato Si embraces three aspects: a theological aspect, an economic aspect, and a scientific...

Should Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who is jail for refusing to issue marriage license, have resigned? Over the past week many people,including many Christianssympathetic to her cause, have said Davis should resigned from her elected position as Rowan County Clerk if her conscience won’t allow her to do the job as required. While I understand the reasoning, and am even partially sympathetic to that view, I think it misses the reason Davis acted as she did and how...

What is the story about? When the Supreme Court handed down the <Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, it made same-sex marriage legal throughout the U.S. and required every state to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Kim Davis, the county clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, said she could not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples because of her religious objections. To avoid claims that she was discriminating, Davis stopped issuing all marriage licenses — to both same-sex and opposite sex couples....

One of the long-running mistakes of the church has been its various confinements of cultural engagement to particular spheres (e.g. churchplace ministry) or selective “uses” (e.g. evangelistic conversion). But even if we manage to broaden the scope of our stewardship — recognizing that God has called us to pursue truth, goodness, and beauty across all spheres of creation — our imaginations will still require a strong injection of the transformative power of Jesus. When we seek God first and neighbor...

“We live in separate moral universes, and we seem to encounter each other only on the battlefield,” says Greg Forster. “Our imaginative worlds are also separate; everyone watches different movies and shows, reads different blogs, listens to different music.” But one exception, Forster notes, is what he calls the “New Disney”: Pixar (which Disney bought in 2006) and the Walt Disney Animation Studios (2006-present). While they may seem like entertainment for children, the movies being released by the New Disney...

How did the framers of the Constitution seek to preserve liberty and protect against tyranny? Many Americans would say that to protect the individual and minorities against the tyranny of the majority, the Founding Fathers added the Bill of Rights and gave the power to enforce those rights to the Supreme Court. But as Robert George, professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, explains, that answer is wrong—dangerously wrong—and has led to an overall reduction in freedom. ...

The very mand God gave to humanity was to “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Overall, I’d say we’re doing a pretty good job on that “increase the number” since we currently have over 7.3 billion people on the planet. Where we fall short of keeping mand is in the “subdue it” part. As the ESV Study Bible explains, Here the idea is that the man and woman are to make the...

Acton’s latest monograph, On Christians and Prosperity by Rev. James V. Schall will be free as an eBook until midnight on Thursday. To download your free copy, visit . In this work, Schalldiscusses poverty and economic prosperity, including the Christian calling to contribute to human flourishing and care for the poor. To get a glimpse of what this monograph is all about, you can read the Acton Commentaries, “How do we help the poor?” and “The moral dimension of work”...

“The world is not a parsimonious place, in spite of the dogmas of the ecologists,” says James V. Schall in this week’s Acton Commentary. Our most unsettling economic problems are actually not economic but moral—moral ones that cannot be simply passed on from generation to generation. They need to be chosen and internalized by each person in each generation at the risk of deflecting material goods from their proper purposes. Work likewise is not exclusively for its own sake. Rather...

Series Note: Jobs are one of the most important aspects of a morally functioning economy. They help us serve the needs of our neighbors and lead to human flourishing both for the individual and munities. Conversely, not having a job can adversely affect spiritual and psychological well-being of individuals and families. Because unemployment is a spiritual problem, Christians in America need to understand and be aware of the monthly data on employment. Each month highlight the latest numbers we need...