It felt a little like the conclave week all over again inside the Vatican Press Office. Journalists cornering other journalists. Educated guesses and bets. Raised eyebrows of suspicion and plenty of pencil wagging, not to mention the nervous knees bouncing iPads and notepads in the foyer. Journalists gather in Sala Stampa, the Vatican’s Press Office, to ments on Lumen Fidei from curial experts While we were not waiting for black or white plumes of smoke to rise from the Sistine...

Farmer Joel Salatin is a rising star in the slow food world for his appearances in the documentaries Food Inc., Fresh, and in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. What gets minimized or overlooked in these treatments are Salatin’s Christian, capitalist and libertarian leanings. Michael Miller had the chance to explore this under-reported side in an interview with him at his farm in Virginia. Some choice bits from their conversation are at Salatin’s PovertyCure Voices page, and you can see...

mon lesson that many of us were taught in grammar school was what defined an ‘opposite.’ As children we learn that hot and cold are antonyms; as are bad and good, living and dead, love and hate. One statement that I recently heard challenged a childhood preconception of mine. It declared that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. If we think about what indifference is, we soon see that it is in stark opposition to love. To...

The stunning news that the United States may be the most surveilled society in human history has opened a fierce debate on security, privacy, and accountability, says Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School. He says religious believers should be particularly concerned: Persons of faith should be deeply concerned about the current surveillance flap not because privacy is an absolute end in itself but rather because it points to and safeguards something else even more basic and fundamental, namely, human...

We live in a country where many believe that business leaders are greedy while politicians are benevolent. This is why they put so much confidence in government to meet society’s needs instead of in the private sector. That is, business men and women look out for their own “selfish” interests where as politicians are generally good-natured people who look out for the interest of the other as an innate disposition. Time and time again, however, we are confronted with the...

Each Independence Day, I make a point of re-reading President Calvin Coolidge’s speech given on the 150thanniversary Declaration of Independence.I’d encourage you to do the same. Coolidge has a deep understanding of American history, and after contemplating what led the founders to write what they wrote, and what inclined Americans to follow their lead, he ultimately concludes that it was their spiritualinclinations, and the moral and spiritual orientation of the American people, that played the most important role: Our forefathers...

Today at Ethika Politika, I offer an Independence Day reflection on the relation between political liberty, the associations of civil society, and the ascetic spirit necessary to maintain them: Yet if these associations and their societal benefit are in decline, how can we prevent that “soft despotism” Tocqueville so vividly and presciently described? He writes, I see an innumerable crowd of similar and equal men who spin around restlessly, in order to gain small and vulgar pleasures with which they...

On June 27, 2013, Samuel Gregg, Acton’s Director of Research, discussed his book ing Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Futureas part of the 2013 Acton Lecture Series. If you weren’t able to join us here at the Acton Building for the lecture, you can watch below: ...

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI was not able plete his encyclical on faith during his pontificate, and Pope Francis chose plete the work, Lumen Fidei (“The Light of Faith”.) Acton’s Director of Research, Samuel Gregg writes about the connection between these two men, made possible by their faith, at National Review: [I]f there’s anything demonstrated by Pope Francis’s first encyclical letter Lumen Fidei (“The Light of Faith”), it’s a profound continuity between the two men: i.e., their love for and belief...

One of the consistent themes in Christian social teaching is the recognition that this world has both material and spiritual realities. As such, it is not only important that we think about the moral, political, and economic structures that contribute to set the stage for human flourishing but that we also pray for those who are suffering that they would be free to live out their callings as human persons made in God’s image. The Friday weekly intercessory prayer from...