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Over at Providence today, I say a bit about the Trump administration’s trade policy as well as the President’s rhetoric. Here’s a snip: A sober defense of free trade aspires toward freer and freer exchange, even while it recognizes the necessities of incremental improvements and the messiness of politics. President Trump’s tirades against free trade are instructive here. At some level his pronouncements capture an element that free traders have tended to overlook: there are economic costs of globalization that...

Supreme Court smacks down liberal double standard on free speech

Last week the Supreme Court struck down a Minnesota law that banned voters from going to the polls while wearing T-shirts, buttons and similar items containing politically charged messages. On the surface the issue may seem to be a trivial matter—at best a minor win for self-expression. But the court ruling was major victory against the double standards of the political left. As I wrote back in March, the case ofMinnesota Voters Alliance v. Manskyconcerned a Minnesota statute that broadly...

The overdue good news Juneteenth

Although bad news travels fast, good news often takes the scenic route. That appears to have been especially true during the Civil War. Although Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation became official on the first day of January 1863, word didn’t arrive in Texas until June 19, 1865. On that day Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed in Galveston with news that the war had ended and that those who were once enslaved were now free. One of Granger’s first...

Radio Free Acton: RFA Reports on Christians in the civic arena; Discussion on the Trump-Kim summit

On this episode of Radio Free Acton, we are pleased to bring you the third edition of RFA Reports. Guest Anne Marie Schieber, an award-winning reporter and former anchor with WOOD TV Grand Rapids, speaks with Rafael Cruz, father of former presidential candidate Ted Cruz, on the involvement of Christians in the civic arena and the separation of church and state. Then, RFA host Caroline Roberts talks with Suzanne Scholte, president of the Defense Forum Foundation, on the historic Trump-Kim...

Video: Rev. Ben Johnson on First Things blaming democracy and capitalism for abortion

Rev. Ben Johnson, editor of the Acton Institute Religion & Liberty Transatlantic project, appears on the Stephen Herreid Show on YouTube to talk about his critique of First Things editor Matt Schmitz’s essay which blamed democracy and capitalism for Ireland’s repeal by referendum of its 8th Amendment, which “recognizes the equal right to life of the pregnant woman and the unborn.” Latest news here. Read Johnson’s Acton June 8 blog post: ‘Satanic’ capitalism brought abortion to Ireland: ‘First Things’ editor...

Is the gig economy really reshaping our work?

We continue to hear doomsday prophecies about the future of work, with much of the fear focused on the recent growth of the so-called “gig economy”—a swirling sphere of temporary, flexible, and increasingly independent work. Epitomized by services like Uber and Airbnb, and scattered across a wider variety of independent and web-based work, the expansion of the gig economy has caused many to ponder whether its rise might mean the end of traditional long-term employment and a gloomy future of...

Berkeley’s ‘mass extinction’ scare just more Malthusian mythology

Too often, environmentalists seem to see humans as a cancer mutilating the earth’s natural splendor, but the idea that fewer people is the solution to the earth’s woes ignores the incredible creative capacity inherent in the human mind. On June 12th, the Berkeley City Council unanimously voted to declare a state of “climate emergency.” The resolution, introduced by Council Member Cheryl Davila, calls for California governments to “initiate a just local, state, national, and global climate emergency mobilization to restore...

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 22, 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 22, 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 22, 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 22, 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 22, 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 22, 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 22, 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 22, 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 22, 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 22, 2025