The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has decided to uphold the California Department of Managed Health Care’s 2014 mandate that health care providers must include elective abortion coverage in all their plans. Previously, several health panies in California had provided plans exempting these services for customers with religious objections, including churches and religiously-affiliated schools. The statement released by the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) under the HHS plaints that the California...

David Bahnsen explains “value investing” at Acton University. How should your views on morality affect your investment strategy? David Bahnsen, Chief Investment Officer at The Bahnsen Group, argues in an Acton University presentation titled “Value Investing” that the question is a plex one. He begins by outlining the purpose of investment consistent with its definition: to make a profit. Without growth, there is no investing. Similarly, there is no such thing as a risk free investment. Biblical investment is therefore...

With Great Britain’s stunning decision to leave the European Union, media outlets have been looking mentary to explain the motivations for the move and the likely consequences, and Acton’s experts have risen to the challenge. Acton’sDirector of International Outreach Todd Huizinga – author ofThe New Totalitarian Temptation, which provides a great deal of insight and background on the European Union – joined BuisnessWeek contributor Eric Schiffer onNewsmax Primeon Friday evening to discuss the vote and its aftermath, and Director of...

The United Kingdom shocked everyone and made the decision to leave the European Union. With 72.2 percent voter turnout, 51.9 percent chose to leave. England and Wales voted to leave while Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain. You can see a breakdown of the referendum numbers at the Telegraph. Acton’s director of international outreach and author of The New Totalitarian Temptation, Todd Huizinga, issued the following statement congratulating the Brits on their decision: Hats off to the British people...

“The free market is the greatest producer of wealth in history — it has lifted billions of people out of poverty.” – President Barack Obama at a panel discussion on poverty in May 2015. The United States ranks as the 11th most economically free country in the world according to the Heritage Freedom Index, and has a history of embracing free-markets yet the rate of poverty still stands at a poignant 14.8 percent. Why is this the case? While the...

In a piece published at The Catholic World Report, Samuel Gregg maps out the EU’s origins and decline and Britain’s consequential cry to leave its grasp. Gregg explains that although British voters chose to vote for Brexit for various reasons, “It’s hard, however, to deny that the EU’s top-down approach to public life, its stealth supplanting of national laws, and, perhaps above all, the sheer arrogance of its political-bureaucratic leadership played a major role in causing 52 percent of British...

The industrial revolution did not begin in the eighteenth century, but was a gradual process of prised of the individual actions of thousands of innovators across time. The dramatic changes in the world e about partially due to the technological growth, some of which developed out of this revolution of industry. It is not the result of a few “great, singular men”, but of many interconnected individual innovations. Jeffrey Tucker, Director of Content at FEE (Foundation for Economic Education) painted...

Americans produce a lot of trash — about 7.1 pounds per person per day. Out of that, less that one-quarter gets recycled. Should we be recycling more? As scholar Daniel K. Benjamin explains, it depends on the item being recycled. For some trash, recycling uses up more resources than would creating the material from scratch. In this brief video, Benjamin provides some helpful rules of thumb about when you should and should not bother to recycle. ...

Father Benjamin Fiiriter traveled over 20 hours from Ghana to attend Acton University earlier this month. He works in the Diocese of Wa in various capacities at the Finance Office, Estates Office and Procuration, Pontifical Mission Societies and the General Correspondence of the Bishop and the Curia. In his extensive work with Church documents, he felt a formal “academic and spiritual refresher” was necessary. He was not disappointed. Among his favorite courses were Christian Anthropology, which has a “wide and...

Photography by Larry D. Moore Today marks the 20th birthday of the Nintendo 64 (N64) gaming console. Don Reisinger offered a great tribute at Fortune: On this day in Japan 20 years ago, Nintendo introduced the gaming system, among the first consoles to create realistic-looking 3D worlds filled with monsters, soldiers, and blood. It’s standard game design today, but at that point, it was new and exciting. Before the Nintendo 64’s launch, gamers were largely forced into games with pixelated...