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It’s ‘Equal Pay Day:’ Celebrating An Economic Myth

By Presidential Proclamation, today is “Equal Pay Day,” a day meant to draw attention to the “fact” that women still aren’t getting paid the same as men. No matter how hard we try, we just can’t seem to catch up. 77 cents on the dollar – that’s where we ladies are sitting and stagnating. Except it’s a myth. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Mark J. Perry and Andrew G. Biggs tear this disparity issue apart. It’s not simply a matter...

Liberals Acting Illiberally

“Liberal: not bound by traditional ways or beliefs.” A “liberal” then, would be a person who is open-minded, ready to listen to another point of view. “I’m not bound to any traditions; I’m open-minded. I am liberal.” Yet, recently, liberals are showing they are as close-minded as the “conservatives” they claim have it all wrong. For instance, Mozilla’s Brendan Eich was forced out as pany’s leader (despite pany’s strong stance on tolerance) because he had contributed to a pro-traditional marriage...

Mozilla: Mounting The Heads Of Conservatives On Their Walls

Mitchell Baker, executive chair of Mozilla, announced on pany’s blog that Brendan Eich, former Mozilla CEO has stepped down “for Mozilla and munity.” His sin: contributing $1000 in 2008 in support of California’s Prop 8, which upheld traditional marriage. Now, Mozilla is pany that takes great pride in their – ahem – tolerance and open-mindedness. Really. Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality....

7 Figures: Wages and Employment in America

[Note: This is the first post in ‘7 Figures’, a new, occasional series highlighting data and information from a variety of surveys and reports.] The U.S. Department of Labor recently released data from the Occupational Employment Statistics program, which provides employment and wage estimates by area and by industry for wage and salary workers in hundreds of occupation groups in America. Here are seven figures based on the report: 1. Retail salespersons and cashiers were the occupations with the largest...

Mozilla’s Statement of Faith and the Altars of Conformity

Brendan Eich, Mozilla co-founder and creator of the JavaScript programming language, was recently appointed as Mozilla’s chief executive. Just one week later, however, he was pressured to resign. His iniquity? Donating $1,000 in support of Proposition 8, a measure whose basic aim was entirely consistent with the beliefs of Barack Obama at the time. To announce Eich’s departure, Mozilla quickly movedto clarify, offering a statement of faithof sorts, filled with all the right Orwellian flourishes: Mozilla believes both in equality...

Mozilla’s Brendan Eich and Progressive Bullies

Last week was one of mixed blessings for those engaged in the U.S. political process. On the positive side, the U.S. Supreme Court – by a 5-4 margin – struck down overall limits on campaign contributions. Unfortunately, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction for Brendan Eich, co-founder and chief executive officer of Mozilla, who resigned after the Los Angeles Times disclosed his $1,000 contribution in support of California’s 2012 Proposition 8. Eich’s unfortunate circumstances bring to mind the many...

The Life You (Don’t) Want: Oprah’s Tour for the Self-Centered

Oprah Winfrey recently announced her first-ever cross-country tour, “The Life You Want,” which will feature Oprah “like you’ve never seen,” in addition to talks from a series of “hand-picked” gurus, including Iyanla Vanzant, Deepak Chopra, Elizabeth Gilbert, and former pastor Rob Bell. “It’s about living the life you want,”Oprah explains, “because a great percentage of the population is living a life that their mother wanted, that their husband wanted, that they thought or heard they wanted…Start embracing the life that...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

How Dispensationalism Got Left Behind

Whether we like it or not, Americans, in one way or another, have all been indelibly shaped by dispensationalism. Such is the subtext of Daniel Hummel’s provocative telling of the rise and fall of dispensationalism in America. In a little less than 350 pages, Hummel traces how a relatively insignificant Irishman from the Plymouth Brethren, John Nelson Darby, prompted the proliferation of dispensational theology, especially its eschatology, or theology of the end times, among our ecclesiastical, cultural, and political...

Nov 24, 2025

C.S. Lewis and the Apocalypse of Gender

From very nearly the beginning, Christianity has wrestled with the question of the body. Heretics from gnostics to docetists devalued physical reality and the body, while orthodox Christianity insisted that the physical world offers us true signs pointing to God. This quarrel persists today, and one form it takes is the general confusion among Christians and non-Christians alike about gender. Is gender an abstracted idea? Is it reducible to biological characteristics? Is it a set of behaviors determined by...

Nov 24, 2025

Mistaken About Poverty

Perhaps it is because America is the land of liberty and opportunity that debates about poverty are especially intense in the United States. Americans and would-be Americans have long been told that if they work hard enough and persevere they can achieve their dreams. For many people, the mere existence of poverty—absolute or relative—raises doubts about that promise and the American experiment more generally. Is it true that America suffers more poverty than any other advanced democracy in the...

Nov 24, 2025

Lord Jonathan Sacks: The West’s Rabbi

In October 1798, the president of the United States wrote to officers of the Massachusetts militia, acknowledging a limitation of federal rule. “We have no government,” John Adams wrote, “armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, and revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” The nation that Adams had helped to found would require the parts of the body...

Nov 24, 2025

Adam Smith and the Poor

Adam Smith did not seem to think that riches were requisite to happiness: “the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments). But he did not mend beggary. The beggar here is not any beggar, but Diogenes the Cynic, who asked of Alexander the Great only to step back so as not to cast a shadow upon Diogenes as he reclined alongside the highway....

Nov 24, 2025

Creating an Economy of Inclusion

The poor have been the main subject of concern in the whole tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. The Catholic Church talks often about a “preferential option for the poor.” In recent years, many of the Church’s social teaching documents have been particularly focused on the needs of the poorest people in the world’s poorest countries. The first major analysis of this topic could be said to have been in the papal encyclical Populorum Progressio, published in 1967 by Pope...

Nov 24, 2025

Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church

Religion & Liberty: Volume 33, Number 4 Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church by Christopher Parr • October 30, 2023 Portrait of Charles Spurgeon by Alexander Melville (1885) Charles Spurgeon was a young, zealous 15-year-old boy when he came to faith in Christ. A letter to his mother at the time captures the enthusiasm of his newfound Christian faith: “Oh, how I wish that I could do something for Christ.” God granted that wish, as Spurgeon would e “the prince of...

Nov 24, 2025

Up from the Liberal Founding

During the 20th century, scholars of the American founding generally believed that it was liberal. Specifically, they saw the founding as rooted in the political thought of 17th-century English philosopher John Locke. In addition, they saw Locke as a primarily secular thinker, one who sought to isolate the role of religion from political considerations except when necessary to prop up the various assumptions he made for natural rights. These included a divine creator responsible for a rational world for...

Nov 24, 2025

Jesus and Class Warfare

Plenty of Marxists have turned to the New Testament and the origins of Christianity. Memorable examples include the works of F.D. Maurice and Zhu Weizhi’s Jesus the Proletarian. After criticizing how so many translations of the New Testament soften Jesus’ teachings regarding material possessions, greed, and wealth, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has gone so far to ask, “Are Christians supposed to be Communists?” In the Huffington Post, Dan Arel has even claimed that “Jesus was clearly a Marxist,...

Nov 24, 2025

Conversation Starters with … Anne Bradley

Anne Bradley is an Acton affiliate scholar, the vice president of academic affairs at The Fund for American Studies, and professor of economics at The Institute of World Politics. There’s much talk about mon good capitalism” these days, especially from the New Right. Is this long overdue, that a hyper-individualism be beaten back, or is it merely cover for increasing state control of the economy? Let me begin by saying that I hate “capitalism with adjectives” in general. This...

Nov 24, 2025