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“Winning isn’t everything.” Whatever happened to this slice of wisdom? In Columbus, Ohio, a team of baseball players has been ejected from their league for being “too good”! (Read the story here). The parents of the teams being slaughtered by the better plained that losing was seriously detrimental to their kids’ self-esteem. Therefore, the league decided to reward the hard work of the winning team with expulsion. Winning isn’t everything, but apparently, losing is. What this league and the supporting...

The problem with aid

In a number of previous posts, I have expressed concern over new efforts to increase the amount of government-to-government aid to Africa (see here, here, and here for background). Today brings another bit of news that should give pause to anyone advocating for massive increases in government aid to Africa. From Saturday’s London (UK) Telegraph : The scale of the task facing Tony Blair in his drive to help Africa was laid bare yesterday when it emerged that Nigeria’s past...

Reagan voted greatest American

Ronald Reagan was voted the Greatest American in history by a slim margin by a Discovery Channel program, barely beating out Abraham Lincoln. Martin Luther King, Jr., George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin rounded out the top 5. Of course, I’m not sure how much credence should be lent to a list whose top 100 included such luminaries as Tom Cruise, Ellen DeGeneres, Brett Favre, Dr. Phil, and Michael Moore. In any case, when Ronald Reagan passed away last year, Acton...

Gregg in The Tablet

Samuel Gregg, director of Acton’s Center for Academic Research, wrote “One nation under God?” appearing in tomorrow’s The Tablet: To European eyes, America seems a remarkably united religious country. But the United States is as prey to disputes over secularism as other Western nations. ...

Ruling on the Decalogue

I have to admit that I’ve never been able to get that fired up about the controversies surrounding the various public displays of the Decalogue. It no doubt has to do with my view that it is far more important for the law to be written on our hearts rather than on stone (see for example Jeremiah 31:27-40). It’s all (on both sides) struck me as a little to much like public posturing, and for the Christian conservatives who support...

Journal of Markets & Morality, volume 8, issue 1

Journal of Markets & Morality Volume 8 • Number 1 The publication of this issue (vol. 8, no. 1) marks the full implementation of the journal’s two issue moving wall. This means that as an archived issue, volume 7, number 1 is now freely available in its entirety. Subscribers are able to access electronically the full content of the two most current issues. Stephen Grabill’s editorial deals with these trends in scholarly publishing, with an eye on the specific situation...

How religious right, left can work together

The Detroit News included a statement from me, along with two of their Faith and Policy columnists, reacting to a Washington Post story by Alan Cooperman about cooperation between religious leaders from the political left and right. Here’s my bit: The Washington Post’s article about the prospects for rapprochement between religious conservatives and liberals gets to the heart of the “cold war” that has existed between these groups for so long. The historic intractability of both sides has led to...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Dec 20, 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...

Dec 20, 2025

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...

Dec 20, 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....

Dec 20, 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...

Dec 20, 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,...

Dec 20, 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...

Dec 20, 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...

Dec 20, 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...

Dec 20, 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...

Dec 20, 2025