“For as the soil makes the e up and a garden causes seeds to grow, so the Sovereign Lord will make righteousness and praise spring up before all nations.” -Isaiah 61:11 Jean Marie owns a restaurant and farm in southern Rwanda. After his first year in business, he worked with Urwego, a local micro-finance partner with HOPE International, to secure a loan to purchase more animals and improve his land’s fertility. Today, he employs 8 people, supports 11 orphans, and...

Francis X. Rocca’s Wall Street Journal article about Laudato Si’ has been translated into Spanish. Featured in Tuesday’s EcoLinks, this piece addresses many topics surrounding the new ecological encyclical, including the pope’s seeming condemnation of capitalism. Rocca quotes Acton’s Director of Research, Samuel Gregg who argues that the system the pope condemns is not actually free market capitalism: El pontífice argentino, el primero en la historia en provenir del hemisferio Sur, escribe sobre la “deuda ecológica” del Norte global con...

Economist Nicole Gelinas, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, explains the recent financial crisis in this brief video. Did banks fail us? No, she says. The problem is that the U.S. government has e too closely tied to banks, enabling their bad financial practices. ...

Met. John of Pergamon At the Vatican press conference on Thursday for the launch of Pope Francis’ enviromental encyclical, a high ranking Greek Orthodox bishop, Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, said the document, titled Laudato Si in Latin or Praise be to You in es at a “critical moment in human history” and will “undoubtedly have a worldwide effect on people’s consciousness.” He thanked the pope for “for raising his authoritative voice to draw the attention of the world to...

In today’s Public Discourse, Acton’s director of research, Samuel Gregg, discusses the enormous debt crisis the U.S. and many nations currently face. While debt crises are hardly new, Gregg states, America’s current debt situation is frightening. America’s public debt amounts to approximately 105 percent of GDP. Since 20 January 2009, America’s total outstanding public debt has grown from $10.626 trillion to $18.152 trillion as ofMay 8 this year. Such an increase reflects a consistent disparity between government revenues and expenditures...

William McGurn claims thatLaudato Si’adopts the environmentalists’ logic, if not their full conclusions, in an opinion piece for theWall Street Journal. He critiques the encyclical’s “bleak” tone and economic pronouncements: Put it this way. If you were a parent whose family was languishing in soul-crushing poverty in some desperate part of Africa, you’d hear two messages today: The economist and entrepreneur will tell you that there is no nation so poor that its people cannot lift up themselves if they...

In the Washington Times, Nicholas Hahn critiques the scientific and economic arguments of Pope Francis’s eco-encyclical and the policies the pontiff proposed. Despite the pontiff’s best intentions to steer clear of politics, his encyclical too often engages in sophisticated science and partisan policymaking. Francis blames markets and advances in technology without at least admitting that the Industrial Revolution lifted more people out of poverty than ever before. However, Pope Francis’s “most e contribution” is the affirmation that human beings belong...

Doug Bandow, member of the Advisory Board at the Acton Institute and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, penned an exclusive article for the Acton Institute on the economic effect of the encyclical: In Calling on Government, Laudato Si Underestimates Power of the the Market by Doug Bandow Pope Francis’ new encyclical, Laudato Si, offers a challenging read. That’s why he addresses his message to “every person living on this planet.” In his view “the earth herself, burdened and laid...

Last week the U.S. Treasury announced the $10 bill is next paper currency scheduled for a major redesign, a process that takes years because of the anti-counterfeiting technology involved, and will feature a “notable woman.” The new ten will be unveiled in 2020, the 100th anniversary of the passage of the nineteenth amendment, which gave women the right to vote. As the Treasury explains, “The passage of the nineteenth amendment granted women their right to fully participate in the system...

Doug Bandow, advisory board member of the Acton Institute, praises the new encyclical for its understanding of man and religion, but criticizes it for its lack of knowledge of economics and politics in an article for The American Spectator. Despite mitment to ecological values, the Holy Father acknowledges that “a return to nature cannot be at the expense of freedom and the responsibility of the human being, that is the part of the world tasked with cultivating its ability to...