Calls for freedom, democracy, and secularism end up with “none of the above,” says Hunter Baker: You can find a lot of interesting things on Twitter packaged in pithy statements of no more than 140 characters each. Some of you may recall that in the aftermath of the 2009 election in Iran, a number of protesters claimed that the government had tampered with the results to stay in power. Twitter was a key channel they used both to express their...

“Walter Hooper once said of C.S. Lewis that he was the most truly converted person he had ever met,” says Baptist theologian Timothy George. “The same thing can be justly said of Charles W. Colson, who came to faith in Christ through reading Lewis’ Mere Christianity.” In an article for the National Catholic Register,George examines the legacy of his friend, a man who helped forge Evangelicals and Catholics Together and the ‘Manhattan Declaration.’: Sentenced to prison for his Watergate crimes,...

Why do democracies struggle with debt? One reason, as John Coleman notes, is that one of the problems is that debt is essentially an intergenerational wealth transfer: Debt can often be seen, essentially, a loan from future generations to the current generation. In a democracy, some of the least represented individuals are the young or those from future generations. Young people vote less. They donate and volunteer less. And their concerns — 20, 30, or 40 years in the future...

I recently came across an interesting academic journal, Diaconia: Journal for the Study of Christian Social Practice. One of the sample articles available is by Herman Noordegraaf of the Protestant Theological University in Leiden. His piece is titled, “Aid Under Protest? Churches in the Netherlands and Material Aid to the Poor” (PDF). The latest issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality is a theme issue on “Modern Christian Social Thought,” and a series of pieces take up a line...

“Can one have an off day in giving the Jefferson Lecture (an off week or month in writing it)?” asks Matthew J. Franck in reference to the recent NEH honor afforded to agrarian Wendell Berry. “I’d like to think so. For judging by the text of the lecture Berry gave in Washington at the beginning of this week, his thinking can be fairly repellent.” Titled “It All Turns on Affection,” his lecture is chiefly a catalogue of Berry’s hatreds. He...

Below is an excerpt from an early speech given by Calvin Coolidge to the Algonquin Club in Boston, Mass. in 1915. These remarks are included in a series of speeches Coolidge published in the book, Have Faith in Massachusetts. The speeches primarily deal with his philosophy of government, which because of his emphasis on foundational beliefs, remained consistent. In the excerpt, Coolidge quotes a “Dr. Garman,” who was a professor at Amherst College, in Amherst Mass. Coolidge graduated from the...

May 1st was the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker on the Catholic calendar, and in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI offered a short reflection on human labor when speaking to construction workers (via Whispers in the Loggia): I’m taken in mind to how, in the New Testament, in the profession of Jesus before his public ministry, the word “tecton” appears, which we translate as “carpenter,” because then homes were mostly homes of wood. But, more than a “carpenter,” it’s an...

Current debates surrounding the U.S. federal budget have turned the spotlight on subsidiarity, solidarity and mon good, all aspects of Catholic social teaching. In an article by the Catholic News Service’s Dennis Sadowski, Acton research fellow and director of media Michael Matheson Miller said, “The principles are there. They are to guide us and we are to pay attention to them. You have to affirm those principles. Where Catholics are going to disagree is in the prudential implementation of them.”...

Acton Institute is once again offering a free ebook; this time, Banking, Justice and the Common Good. From now until May 5, 2012 at 3 a.m. EST, you can click on this link and download the monograph for free. We’d appreciate ments and thoughts on the book. When you’ve finished, please go to the Amazon page for the book and leave a review. ...

For PowerBlog readers, we’re posting the video from Andrew Morriss’ April 26 Acton Lecture Series talk in Grand Rapids, Mich., on “The False Promise of Green Energy.” Here’s the lecture description: “Green energy advocates claim that transforming America to an economy based on wind, solar, and biofuels will produce jobs for Americans, benefits for the environment, and restore American industry. Prof. Andrew Morriss, co-author of The False Promise of Green Energy (Cato, 2011), shows that these claims are based on...