Online shopping has soared in the wake of COVID-19, boosting merce giants like Amazon and Walmart, and creating record growth for UPS and FedEx. While some question the moral legitimacy of these gains, others celebrate the market’s ability to respond plex demands, innovating products and adapting supply chains to meet countless human needs. Yet we should also remember that such businesses are not mere machines to be retooled, adjusted, and manipulated for materialistic purposes. Fundamentally, businesses are organisms and ecosystems...

There has been a lot of social media hubbub about Congressman Emanuel Cleaver’s recent prayer in the U.S. House of Representatives, which he closed with “amen and awoman,” apparently striving to be gender inclusive. He omitted atransgender. Cleaver, D-Mo., is an ordained United Methodist who pastored a church in Kansas City for many years. His two-minute prayer was otherwise conventional, full of biblical references and King James cadences – until the very end, when he appealed to the “monotheistic God,”...

Sir Roger Scruton passed away on January 12, 2020 – one year ago today. On the first anniversary of his death, many of his closest friends and colleagues will celebrate his memory and his incalculable contribution to conservatism in a free, online conference titled, “Remembering Roger Scruton.” Scruton’s death from cancer at the age of 75 deprived the worldwide conservative movement of his intellectual prowess, incisive and precise philosophical distinctions, and playfully delightful expressions. He produced an array of books,...

Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West. David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson, eds. University of Notre Dame Press. 2020. 392 pages. English literature scholar Ed Ericson told a story about teaching Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago to American undergrads, who knew plenty about the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and other dehumanized minorities but next to nothing about the genocidal history of the Bolshevik and Stalinist regimes. Ericson, who worked tirelessly to widen Solzhenitsyn’s audience in...

On Wednesday, rioters broke into the U.S. Capitol building, vandalized the halls of government, and caused mayhem that left five people dead, including Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick. These sickening scenes of destruction did e out of the blue. They grew naturally out of cascading failures rippling through the culture, the government, and the church. The D.C. riots reveal the deep failure of the government. How could rioters breach the sanctuary of our republic? “Enormous strategic and planning failures” by...

Sunday January 10, 2021, is Lord Acton’s 187th birthday. This difficult era of a global pandemic, a crisis in institutions, and civil unrest seem strange times indeed to look back on the life and legacy of a Victorian historian of ideas – but, as Lord Acton himself remarked, “if the Past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and surest emancipation.” The freedom of the historian is the freedom to look beyond our...

Raphael Warnock, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Georgia, believes that the Bible teaches socialism and that embracing a Marxist economic platform “actually makes you a Christian.” In a sermon delivered in 2016 in Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, Warnock chided that “evangelicals who stand on the Bible” but reject socialism need to “go back and read the Bible.” Warnock told his flock: The early church was a socialist church. I know you think that’s an oxymoron, but the early...

Few people have the courage to resist a totalitarian system from within; fewer still have the intellectual and moral grounding to plant the seeds of its metamorphosis into a free and virtuous society. The world lost one such person on the last day of 2020. “A wretched year came to a sorrowful end when Father Maciej Zięba, O.P., died in his native Wrocław, Poland, on December 31,” wrote George Weigel in First Things. The 66-year-old Dominican, who suffered from cancer,...

The COVID-19 global pandemic has exposed significant fault lines in America’s educational system, testing moral and mitments among parents, teachers, school administrators, and politicians alike. Punctuated by media battles between teachers’ unions, governors, and the president, one thing has e increasingly clear: America’s public education system is far too vulnerable to the whims of partisanship and far too insulated from the promises of reform. Among individual families, however, the pandemic may be driving a cultural awakening about the value of...

Rev. Robert Sirico, the president and co-founder of the Acton Institute, discussed how Christians should respond to the Capitol riot in a segment of EWTN’s The World Over dedicated to “political protests and lawlessness.” “Why are we seeing more frequent, violent political protests here in the U.S., and what needs to be done about this rioting?” host Raymond Arroyo asked his guests, Rev. Sirico and Catholic League President Bill Donohue. “We need to be outraged – morally outraged – by...