The Polaris Project is one of the most highly-respected human trafficking organizations in the nation. Based in Washington, D.C., the Polaris Project (named after the North Star that guided slaves to freedom in the 1800s) is home to the National Human Trafficking Hotline. The hotline is able to receive calls or texts 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Does it work? Apparently so. Jennifer Kimball was monitoring calls and texts at the hotline a few months ago. In...

If you’re out of work and can’t earn an e, it’s easy to slide down the economic ladder from working-poor to just plain poor. So it’s no surprise that the poverty rate in America has, since at least 1970, moved in sync with the unemployment rate. During each recession we would see a spike in the poverty rate and then a decline as the economy recovers and employment levels began to rise. But around 2010, something seems to have changed....

Vatican Radio reports that the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development is adjusting its economic forecast for major developed economies downward, with growth in the Eurozone projected to be only 0.8% in ing year. Along with this forecast, the OCED is encouraging the European Central Bank to engage in a program of stimulus to offset the negative effects of such weak levels of growth. For analysis on this story, Vatican Radio turned to Kishore Jayabalan, Director of Istituto Acton in...

“Prison is a hopeless place.” That’s how one former inmate describes it. What can give hope? The freedom to practice one’s faith, even behind bars and barbed wire. In October, the Supreme Court will hear the case of Holt v. Hobbs, which involves the following: Abdul Muhammad, an Arkansas inmate, has been denied the ability to grow the ½ inch beard his Muslim mands—even though Arkansas already allows inmates to grow beards for medical reasons, and Mr. Muhammad’s beard would...

Here in Grand Rapids, we are awaiting the beginning of ArtPrize (Sept. 24-Oct. 12.) For those of us who live or work in the city, we are seeing signs of it: posters hung in coffee shop windows, artists installing pieces, restaurants adding waitstaff, and venues getting spit-shined. It’s a big deal: in 2013, ArtPrize brought in 400,000+ visitors to this city, an estimated $22 million in net growth and hundreds of jobs. Not too shabby for an event that didn’t...

There is a near universal agreement that America’s experience with chattel slavery, where people are treated as the chattel or personal property of an owner and are bought and sold as if they modities, was one of our country’s gravest moral horrors. But some people seem to believe that the despicable institution aided the nation’s prosperity. That’s not the case, explains economist Scott Sumner, who points out that countries with free labor tend to be more prosperous: Between 1850 and...

Maybe you’re a parent. If you’re not and you’re a reasonable adult, imagine you are a parent. It’s a lovely day. Your six-year-old would like to play outside. You do not live in the median of an expressway. You do not have a child molester living next door. There is no pack of dogs roaming your neighborhood. You give your son a kiss, a pat on the back, and send him out. And then Child Protective es to visit. No,...

Recently I read Leave Your Tears in Moscow, a harrowing and ultimately triumphant account of Barbara Armonas’s time in a Soviet Siberian prison camp. Armonas, who passed away at the age of 99 in 2008, was separated from her American husband and daughter in Lithuania at the outbreak of World War II. Her husband John Armonas and daughter, both born in the United States, fled Lithuania. Barbara and her son John Jr. stayed behind. Although Barbara had lived for a...

One of the most underreported stories of the last decade is about good news: we’re winning the struggle against chronic hunger around the globe. A new U.N. report estimates that the number of chronically undernourished people in the world has decreased by more than 100 million over the last decade, and 209 million lower than in 1990–92. Those figures are even more remarkable when we consider the global population has increased by almost 2 billion since 1990. According to the...

Word is continuing to spread about For the Life of the World: Letters to the Exiles, the latest film series from the Acton Institute, which seeks to expand the Christian imagination when es to whole-lifestewardship and cultural engagement. With screenings and appearances at places likeQ Nashville, Flourish San Diego, Acton U, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Regent University, to name just a few, Christians from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives are getting a taste of the series and responding...