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Donald Trump nominates Amy Coney Barrett to Supreme Court

President Donald Trump has nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court. The 48-year-old will fill the seat left vacant by the death of 87-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18. President Trump called Barrett “a woman of unparalleled achievement, towering intellect, sterling credentials and unyielding loyalty to the Constitution,” as he introduced hthe nominee in a ceremony in the White House’s Rose Garden at 5 p.m. Eastern on Saturday. He reminded the nation of the impact a...

Bishop: ‘Undue burdens’ not required to fight COVID-19

Much of our national debate around the COVID-19 pandemic and the appropriate government response to it has been framed as opposition between those who say they follow “science” and those who do not. This framing is one which is used to devalue and dismiss critics of ever-shifting state responses to the pandemic, as well as to insulate politicians from any sort of accountability for their own prudential judgements. In this context Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, has written a...

Explainer: Can the president appoint a Supreme Court justice during an election year?

President Donald Trump has decided to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just weeks before the 2020 election. Does he have the legal and constitutional power to do so? What if he loses the election? What have other presidents done? And what about the “Biden” or “Thurmond” Rule? Here are the facts you need to know. Does the president have the power to appoint a Supreme Court justice in his final...

Acton Line podcast: Supreme Disorder and SCOTUS politics with Ilya Shapiro

The untimely death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in February of 2016 amplified questions about the Supreme Court in the 2016 election to new highs. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s high wire act in denying a hearing and vote on President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill that seat, Judge Merrick Garland, ultimately paid off for him: President Donald Trump nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch, who was then confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate. A year later, the political world was...

COVID-19 bailout unleashed a pandemic of fraud

The coronavirus bailout is the largest in U.S. history. While the bill will create a drag on the economy for years, an additional problem is that the massive influx of cash is ripe to e a sheer waste of taxpayer dollars. Fraud was widespread in the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loans and Paycheck Protection Program grants, and it continues to be a problem for the extra payments within unemployment insurance. Because the bailout is larger than any other in history,...

The right attitude about tithing during COVID-19

COVID-19 has caused thousands to lose their jobs and other regular sources of e. As a result, many have had to cut any extra or unnecessary spending to make ends meet. Some of these “extra costs” included donating money to their local church, house of worship, or favorite charity. Whereas many businesses could generate e by moving online during the pandemic, most churches do not have the luxury of pletely “virtual.” In terms of donations, the faithful could certainly wire...

Everything you need to know about Amy Coney Barrett

Amy Coney Barrett’s record of judicial rulings and legal writings shows that she holds an originalist view of the Constitution, and it provides a glimpse into her opinions on such diverse issues as religious liberty, national healthcare, environmental regulations, the right to life, and the Second Amendment. Here are the facts about the woman who could replace replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. Biography Amy Coney Barrett was born to Michael and Linda Coney on January 28,...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Jan 16, 2026

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....

Jan 16, 2026

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...

Jan 16, 2026

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...

Jan 16, 2026

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...

Jan 16, 2026

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...

Jan 16, 2026

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...

Jan 16, 2026

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,...

Jan 16, 2026

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...

Jan 16, 2026

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...

Jan 16, 2026