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 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...

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 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...

On October 4, Daryl Morey, manager of the Houston Rockets, posted a tweet that included the words “Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong.” Afterwards, China severed several partnerships they had with the Rockets in retaliation, leading Morey to delete his tweet and apologize for it and also prompting missioner Adam Silver to issue a statement declaring that the NBA does not regulate the speech of its players. Since then, however, the NBA has made attempts to appease China. So...

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...

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...

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....

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...

The largest number of candidates to date filled the stage at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, for the fourth Democratic presidential debate last night. They offered a number of statements and assessments that bear further scrutiny. 1. Which will benefit workers more: A Universal Basic e or $15 minimum wage? Senator Cory Booker: Ihope that my friend, Andrew Yang, e out for this – doing more for workers than UBI [Universal Basic e] would actually be just raising the minimum...