“The past year has marked a shift in religious liberty debates,” notes Sarah Pulliam Bailey at Christianity Today, “one that previously centered on hiring rights but became focused on health care requirements.” Bailey put together a helpful timeline that shows a number of actions the government took in the past year, setting precedents and priorities on various issues affecting religious freedom. ...

In The American Spectator, Acton Institute’s Michael Matheson Miller throws his hat into the ring as he launches a tongue-in-cheek candidacy for World Bank president, but also raises serious questions about the institution’s poverty fighting programs. Miller is a research fellow at Acton, where he directs PovertyCure, an initiative that promotes enterprise solutions to poverty. Jeffrey Sachs — are you listening? Here are some planks from Miller’s campaign platform: I don’t believe that foreign aid is the solution — or...

With the concept of religious liberty being treated as an antiquated and obsolete notion, it’s refreshing to be reminded of the great, but oft-forgotten, Founding Father John Witherspoon. As John Willson writes, Witherspoon—who was asigner of the Declaration, member of Congress, and President of Princeton—had a profound understanding of how the government should relate to religion: Witherspoon had not the slightest doubt that there was truth, and that it can be apprehended in the gospel of Jesus Christ as expressed...

The Reformation doctrine of vocation teaches that even seemingly secular jobs and earthly relationships are spheres where God assigns Christians to live out their faith, notes Gene Veith. But are there some lines of work that Christians should avoid? God himself works through human vocations in providential care as he governs the world. He provides daily bread through farmers and bakers. He protects us through lawful magistrates. He heals us by means of physicians, nurses, and pharmacists. He creates new...

Which does a better job helping the impoverished peoplearound the globe—free trade or fair trade? The American Enterprise Institute recently held a debate on that topic at John Brown Universityentitled “Free Trade vs. Fair Trade: What Helps the Poor?” Click here to watch the debate between scholars Claude Barfield, Paul Myers, and Victor Claar. In the debate Dr. Claar raises concerns about both the logic and economic reasoning underlying the fair trade movement. He also expands on that theme in...

Both the original promise versions of the Obama administration’s health insurance mandate (the HHS mandate) coerce people into paying, either directly or indirectly, for other people’s contraception. The policy may have been pushed along by exigencies of Democratic Party constituency politics, but I suspect there’s also a worldview dimension to the mandate, one embodied in one of President Obama’s more controversial appointments—Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren. Holdren, as far as I know, wasn’t involved in crafting President Obama’s...

I saw the fine film Act of Valor last month, and I was struck by the level of sacrifice displayed in the lives of the service members featured. I have wondered in the meantime whether the scale of the sacrifice that’s been required of American service persons over the last two decades is sustainable. One of the film’s characters leaves behind a pregnant wife, and beyond all of the usual and somewhat abstract “faith and freedom” reasons for serving in...

Would dissolving the mon currency, as proposed by the French free-market economist and entrepreneur Charles Gave in his bookLibéral mais non coupable(“Liberal But Not Guilty”) free the Old Continent to stand upright on its financial feet again?Or would dissolving the currency drastically end the European project altogether, as some pro-Euro technocrats in Brussels fear? Charles Gave, the chairman of the investment firmGaveKal, (and whose lecture I listened to at a 2011 Acton Conference Family Enterprise, Market Economies, and Poverty in...

There are only a few days left to register for the AU Online session, Private Charity: A Practitioner’s View! This online session will take place on March 27 and feature highly-rated Acton lecturer and current U.S. Regional Facilitator for Partners Worldwide, Rudy Carrasco. In a lecture that blends the theoretical with real-life encounters and stories, Rudy shows how using local knowledge and resources unavailable and unsuited to public agencies is vital for effective charity. Why wait to hear Rudy speak...

Michael Gerson on what the Obama administration’s view of religious liberty shares with John Locke: One tradition of religious liberty contends that freedom of conscience is protected and advanced by the autonomy of religious groups. In this view, government should honor an institutional pluralism — the ability of people to associate, live and act in accordance with their religious beliefs, limited only by the clear requirements of public order. So Roger Williams ed Catholics and Quakers to the Rhode Island...