This is the Acton Commentary for January 12. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations,” wrote French observer Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s. “If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society.” Could this organizing spirit hold the potential to transform the nation’s health care? With the House in Republican hands, it appears that the 2010 Patient Protection and...

A popular citation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s justly-famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is his reference to natural law and Thomas Aquinas: How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is...

With health care moving back to center stage in Washington, we’re publishing Dr. Donald Condit’s Acton monograph A Prescription for Health Care Reform as a free eBook readable in a variety of formats. This excellent work continues to be available for $6 (paperback) in the Acton Bookshoppe. For your free eBook, visit Acton’s Smashwords page. The Condit book will soon be available in the Kindle store (no charge for that, either) and in other eBook retail sites. We’ll keep you...

I’ve issued a call for publication for a special issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality to appear in the Fall of 2011 (14.2). The details are below, and you can download and circulate a PDF as well. Call for Publication: Modern Christian Social Thought In recognition of a number of significant anniversaries occurring this year, the Journal of Markets & Morality invites submissions for a special theme issue, “Modern Christian Social Thought” (vol. 14, no. 2). The year...

Patriarch Kirill gives an emphatic “no” in a TV interview. He points to the catastrophe of the Bolshevik Revolution and what followed. Here’s a snip from Interfax: “And then everything was broken. Eventually with great efforts, including terror, high economic indicators were reached,” the Patriarch said explaining further collapse of the USSR with the fact that the “backbone of national life was destroyed” in years of revolution. “Today our life is worse not because we are Orthodox, but because we...

Radio Free Acton hits the web once again today, this time featuring an exchange between Hunter Baker, author of The End of Secularism, and Jonathan Malesic, author of Secret Faith in the Public Square: An Argument for the Concealment of Christian Identity. Their conversation continues an exchange begun in the Controversy section of the latest issue of Acton’s Journal of Markets & Morality. Should Christians be overt about their faith when operating in the public square, or should Christian identity...

In this week’s Acton Commentary, “The Sheep and the Goats: Work and Service to Others,” I visit Lester DeKoster’s interpretation of the parable of the sheep and the goats from Matthew 25. Although not many have discussed this as an “economic” parable, DeKoster’s point is that anyone who truly serves another through legitimate work, whether paid or unpaid, can be understood to be a “sheep.” Work, for DeKoster, is “the form in which we make ourselves useful to others, and...

The latest issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality (13.2) is now available online to subscribers. This issue features a fine set of articles from Manfred Spieker, Gregorio Guitián, Joseph Burke, and Jim Skillen. It also has the usual range of book reviews, so ably overseen by the journal’s book review editor Kevin Schmiesing. This issue also has two special features. The first is a controversy between Jonathan Malesic, assistant professor of theology at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania,...

Tom Oden In the ing Winter 2011 issue of Religion & Liberty, we are featuring an interview with Thomas C. Oden. The interview mainly focuses on the importance and wisdom of the Church Fathers and their deep relevancy for today’s Church and culture. The content below however delves into Marxist liberation theology and the direction of Oden’s own denomination, The United Methodist Church. Some of the below portion will be available only for readers of the PowerBlog. I’d like to...

An interesting report in The Economist on the rise of flashy and free spending entrepreneur “gazillionaires” in India and China and how they are perceived: In much of India, life is getting perceptibly better each year. Wealth per person has vaulted by 150% in the past decade, from $2,000 to $5,000. Many Indians think the nation’s entrepreneurs deserve some of the credit. In Dharavi, a slum outside Mumbai, an illiterate mother called Aruna sits in her tiny one-room flat, which...