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The Audacity of Irony: Obama and “Religious Freedom Day”

Yesterday, while his lawyers were busy defending against charges that the Obama administration violated the religious freedoms of his fellow citizens, President Obama was designating January 17 as Religious Freedom Day. The author of the The Audacity of Hope has the audacity to hope that Americans will not snicker at the idea that he’s a defender of religious liberty. In his proclamation, Obama says, Today, we also remember that religious liberty is not just an American right; it is a...

Amity Shlaes on ‘The Good Rich’ and the Folly of Philanthropy

In a new book, The Good Rich and What They Cost Us, Robert Dalzell Jr. aims to address “a great paradox at the core of the American Dream: a passionate belief in the principles of bined with an equally passionate celebration of wealth.” In a review for the Wall Street Journal, Amity Shlaes notes that although the book provides an in-depth look at the history of American philanthropy, the author’s own personal prescriptions lend too high a trust to government...

We Should Affirm All Callings—Even Pastoral Ones

The winter issue of Leadership Journal is on vocation and callings. In the lead editorial, managing editor Drew Dyck reminds us that while it’s important to affirm the calling of lawyers, journalists, and plumbers, we need to remember that being a pastor is a calling too: I applaud this move toward a more holistic understanding of vocation. I’ve seen numerous books on the topic published in the past few years. Conferences are springing up. What’s most heartening is to see...

Audio: Samuel Gregg on Secularism, Religion and ‘Becoming Europe’

Acton Institute Research Director Samuel Gregg was recently featured on three different radio shows. He discussed ing Europe as well as plications resulting from a growing religious diversity in Europe. Gregg was the featured on KSGF Mornings with Nick Reed as the author of the week, discussing ing Europe. Listen to the full interview here: [audio: He also discussed ing Europeon the Bob Dutko Show.Listen here: [audio: Al Kresta interviewed Gregg on Kresta in the Afternoon, in order to discuss...

Dick DeVos on Michigan’s New Right-to-Work Law

The Heritage Foundation recently interviewed Michigan businessman and entrepreneur Dick DeVos, a former candidate for governor, about how Michigan was able to pass their Right-to-Work law and what lessons conservatives can take away from the victory as they make the case for freedom. ...

AU Online: ‘Building a Marketplace Theology’ series begins Jan. 22

When we think of markets, we may conjure up a picture of goods and services production, supply and demand economics, and freedom of exchange. This of course is an accurate depiction, but what if in addition to this, the marketplace is actually divinely inspired and can be utilized to fulfill God’s mission? In the ing AU Online four-part lecture series, Building a Marketplace Theology: From Conception to Execution of an Evangelistic Marketplace Practicum, serial entrepreneur David Doty will explore this...

A Cookie for Me, But Not for Thee

There are some amazing economic and moral lessons, related to redistribution, zeo-sum fallacies, as well as virtue and desire, embedded in this Sesame Street video: Can you think of any other ways that both Ernie and Cookie Monster might have been able to be happy instead of sad? And what if the object in question weren’t a cookie, but instead something like an apple, perhaps? ...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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 20, 2024

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 20, 2024

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 20, 2024

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 20, 2024

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 20, 2024

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 20, 2024

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 20, 2024

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 20, 2024

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 20, 2024

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 20, 2024