Earlier this month the Acton Institute moved to its new home in downtown Grand Rapids, Mich. David Urban of The Rapidian has an update on the transition: The 38,000 square foot building features a multi-functional, high-tech conference center and auditorium that can hold events for more than 200 people, a media center, several libraries, and office space for the institute’s staff. The institute will occupy the basement and first floor of the building. Acton employees have expressed excitement about how...

Yesterday, Cardinals choose Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina to be the new pope. A The Detroit News editorial points out that “[t]hirty-nine percent of the world’s Catholics live in Latin America, making this pope a fitting choice for many Catholics.” Countries with the largest number of Catholics include Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines and U.S. One hundred years ago, that landscape was shifted toward Europe, with France and Italy housing the greatest number. The Detroit News asked Acton Research Fellow Michael Miller...

Television is often lamented for its propensity to exaggerate the mundane and the ordinary. Yet when es to something as routinely downplayed and unfairly pooh-poohed as our daily work—the “rat race,” the “grindstone,” yadda-yadda—I wonder if television’s over-the-top tendencies might be just what we need to reorient our thinking about the broader significance of our work. As I’ve argued previously, we face a constant temptation to limit our economic endeavors to the temporal and the material, focusing only on “putting...

Director of the Istituto Acton in Rome, Kishore Jayabalan, and Acton Director of Research, Samuel Gregg, were recently featured on Ave Maria’s Al Kresta in the Afternoon to discuss the selection of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires as Pope Francis. Jayabalan was in St. Peter’s Square for the announcement and he says that the mood in Rome was quite different than it was in 2005. Despite the thousands of people in the square, it was very quiet; most people...

(March is Women’s History Month. Acton will be highlighting a number of women who have contributed significantly to the issue of liberty during this month.) In today’s era of texting, Facebooking and emails, one wonders fortable our nation’s second First Lady would have felt about these forms munication. Abigail Smith Adams, while not a “woman of letters” (she had little formal education), left behind letters that tell us much about her, her marriage and her desire to be part of...

Early today, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina was elected as the 266th pope of the Catholic Church. Here are nine things you should know about Pope Francis. 1. Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires in 1936. His father was an Italian immigrant. 2. He’s the first pope from South America. The only remaining continents that have never had a e from their lands are Australia, Antarctica, and North America. 3. He’s the first Jesuit pope. 4. He...

When government provision is expected in all areas of life we begin to neglect our personal obligations to our families and neighbors, says Dylan Pahman, assistant editor of the Journal of Markets & Morality. “For the ancient Jews, intergenerational relations were a religious matter,” says Pahman. mand ‘honor your father and mother’ (cf. Exodus 20:12) served as a bridge between duties to God and duties to neighbors. Our situation today may be quite different than that faced by Jews in...

In their book, American Society: How It Really Works, authors Erik Wright and Joel Rogers make the case that when we talk about social injustice most Americans think in terms of some sort of material inequality that might be considered unfair and possibly remedied if our social institutions were different. There are multiple problems with this reduction but it is fair to say that this is a dominant conceptual framework in our culture today. As a result, one of the...

New Delhi TV recently published a Agence Franch-Presse report describing the former pope’s “invisible presence at conclave:” Retired pope Benedict XVI is gone but far from forgotten as cardinals begin voting for candidates to replace him, with his personal secretary Georg Gaenswein one of the last to leave the Sistine Chapel before the start of the conclave. Rev. Robert Sirico addresses Benedict’s influence on the conclave: Benedict has “been very careful not to insert himself into the proceedings” for his...

With the election of Pope Francis, the Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina, the Rev. Robert A. Sirico released the following statement. “Pope Francis is a man of great spirituality who is known for mitment to doctrinal orthodoxy as well as for his simplicity of life,” Rev. Sirico said. “Like Benedict XVI, bines concern for the poor with an insistence that it’s not the Church’s responsibility to be a political actor or to prescribe precise solutions to economic...