Edmund Conway, economics editor of The Telegraph, looks at a new analysis of government debt by Dylan Grice of Societe Generale. The charts are eye popping. It’s not just a Greek, or EU problem. It’s also something that Americans e to grips with, and soon. You might call it a moral issue — too long living beyond our means. Conway quotes Grice, and then sums up: “The most chilling similarity between the Greeks and everyone else isn’t in the charts...

A very good piece on taxation, e inequality and fairness in today’s Wall Street Journal by Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute. Brooks, a frequent guest speaker at Acton events, is also author of “The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future”, ing from Basic Books in June. Watch for the review on the PowerBlog soon. Simple facts about our tax system do not support the contention that it is...

Acton President Rev. Robert A. Sirico and Kishore Jayabalan, the Director of Acton’s Rome office, joined host Al Kresta on Kresta in the Afternoon on Friday along with another guest to discuss the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI as the world marks the fifth anniversary of his elevation to the papacy; audio of the segment is available via the audio player below. [audio: ...

Catholic World Report published a roundup mentary on the fifth anniversary of Benedict’s pontificate. I contributed a piece titled Retrieval and Reintegration and was joined by a number of outstanding writers whose work is indexed here. Benedict’s efforts to let the past inform and guide the Church’s future By Father Robert Sirico On March 18, 2005, having been at the Vatican to speak at a memorating the 40th anniversary of Gaudium et Spes, I found myself concelebrating Mass in St....

A Polish friend mended this NYT piece by Roger Cohen reflecting on the most recent tragedy visited upon the Polish people. Cohen’s friend, Adam Michnik in Warsaw, “an intellectual imprisoned six times by the former puppet-Soviet Communist rulers,” had said to him in the past that: …my obsession has been that we should have a revolution that does not resemble the French or Russian, but rather the American, in the sense that it be for something, not against something. A...

Some Earth Day thoughts, beginning with some reflections on the month of April by two great poets, over at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Prior to the inaugural Earth Day in 1970, we witnessed environmental catastrophes of nearly Biblical or World War proportions. Rivers caught on fire, whole species were on the brink of extinction and smog enveloped our cities. One could say a new breed of Man evolved from this morass, emboldened with the conservative spirit of preservation...

The family friendly Movieguide published my review of Michael Moore’s trashing of the market economy, “Capitalism: A Love Story.” Excerpt: Perhaps the most egregious bit of manipulative effort Moore displays in his latest attempt, which by all reports has failed miserably at the box office, is his attempt to use religion, in particular the social teachings of the Catholic Church, to grant an imprimatur to his un-nuanced critique of the business economy. e out of his Catholic closet (who knew...

Sign up for Acton News & Commentary here. This week, I contributed a piece on Jim Wallis’ new book. +++++++++ This class of the very poor – those who are just on the borders of pauperism or fairly over the borders – is rapidly growing. Wealth is increasing very fast; poverty, even pauperism, is increasing still more rapidly. – Washington Gladden, Applied Christianity (1886) For three decades, we have experienced a social engineered inequality that is really a sin –...

Last night I got a phone call from a polling organization that wanted to ask me some questions about local ing elections and issues.” I listened to the introductory remarks politely but soon found myself persuaded to ask a question. “Where are you calling from?” If you don’t have call blocker, or an answering machine and still pick up your phone from time to time, you likely have listened to “Tina” or “Amy” from a remote area of Bombay or...

The latest issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality, vol. 12, no. 2 (Fall 2009) is now fully online. In the editorial for this issue, “A Legacy of Stewardship,” I write of the loss in 2009 of two figures of importance for the Acton Institute: “In the unique matrix of vocation that made up their lives, Lester DeKoster and Karen Laub-Novak have each left this world with a legacy of faithful stewardship, and it is to such that this...