The integration of Europe in the postwar era continues to roil politics continent-wide, most notably taking center stage in this week’s UK general election. Yet Acton Institute Director of Research Samuel Gregg writes that Charles de Gaulle could have spared Europe this future. Gregg traces the history of European supranationalism from Immanuel Kant to Jacques Maritain’s Christian Democratic ideas in a new essay posted today at Law & Liberty. De Gaulle, although far from an isolationist, understood the reality of...

Faith and reason are mutually reinforcing. When faith and reason bined, faith is kept from metastasizing into irrationality and reason is kept from ing overly materialistic. bination of faith and reason is the foundation of Western Civilization. In a new review of Samuel Gregg’s book, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, Gene Veith of Patrick Henry College notes that “[t]he scholastic theology of Roman Catholicism, grounded as it is in Aristotelian philosophy, does indeed integrate faith and reason,...

The day after Thanksgiving, the world saw a murderous terrorist prevented from maximizing his death toll by desperate people armed with nothing more than personal courage, a narwhal tusk, and a fire extinguisher. As I write at The Stream, unless the West jettisons its paralyzing doubt of itself and its historic faith, that scene threatens to e an “epoch-defining event.” Naively believing that all religions are alike, and that Western capitalism is uniquely exploitative, renders European culture incapable of understanding...

Sen. Marco Rubio’s recent speech on capitalism and mon good, taking its point of departure in Rerum Novarum, has gotten a good bit of coverage. Yesterday he delivered remarks at the National Defense University and opened with these words: This morning I am honored to speak here at the National Defense University to discuss the defining geopolitical relationship of this century: the one between the United States and China. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a papal encyclical on this...

In an emotional story in the January 2020 issue of Reason, Jose Cordiero relays how “socialism killed my father” – through economic scarcity. His article highlights the life-and-death stakes of wealth creation. Cordiero writes that he was working in Silicon Valley when he got a call that his father had experienced kidney failure in Caracas. Yet even traveling to Bolivarian Venezuela became virtually impossible. The economic collapse ushered in by Hugo Chavez’s socialist policies dried up demand: Indeed, the number...

In The Christian Century, Rev. David Mesenbring provides an accounting of his experiences with fair trade. Mesenbring, who was an early advocate and adopter of fair trade practices and policies, thinks there’s good reason to doubt the efficacy of the movement as currently stands. I was an early adopter of fair trade. Prior exposure to rural poverty in Africa had sensitized me to the plight of farmers in the global economy. Searching for a fair trade logo on my purchases...

The world of medieval history suffered a great loss on November 30 with the death of Professor Brian Tierney. Widely recognized as a leading scholar of medieval Western Christianity and how church law and institutions affected the broader culture of Europe, Tierney wrote widely but also deeply on topics ranging from the origins of papal infallibility to how religion shaped the development of constitutionalism. Born in 1922, the formative experience for Tierney was, like for most of his generation, the...

As you relax or workout this week, you can take Acton’s issues – and even some of the people of Acton – with you. Two podcasts, produced on different sides of the Atlantic, would make ideal listening. Podcast 1: The BBC discusses U.S. school choice On Thursday, the BBC World Service program Outlook reported on the inspiring life story of Virginia Walden Ford in a segment titled, “A mother’s battle for her son’s education.” Ford is the subject of the...

The 2019 Acton Lecture Series wrapped up last week Thursday with a lecture by David Hebert,assistant professor of economics and director of the Center for Markets, Ethics, and Entrepreneurship at Aquinas College. Hebert told the story of Frederick Tudor, a Boston entrepreneur who in the early 1800s set about finding a way to transport ice to Cuba, believing that given the opportunity, Cubans would pay handsomely for the resource. It wasn’t easy, but in the end he was right, and...

“Anti-Semitism,” quipped nineteenth-century German socialist August Bebel, “is the socialism of fools.” However, a chilling new video shows that socialism helps prime leftists to espouse anti-Jewish sentiments in an instant. The UK’s Labour Party in general, and party leader Jeremy Corbyn in particular, have long been accused of being indifferent to, or vaguely supportive of, anti-Semitism. “A new poison – sanctioned from the very top – has taken root in the Labour Party,” wrote the apolitical Chief Rabbi of the...