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How are free-market think tanks doing on social media?

Alejandro Chafuen, Acton’s Managing Director, International, posted his annual analysis of think tanks’ use of social media last week inForbes. He wrote: Due to the coronavirus pandemic think tanks around the world are working under quarantine and have cancelled all events in ing months. They will have to rely more on social media to get their messages across. How successful are free-market think tanks today in trying to attract traffic to their websites, as well as views and followers on...

How to learn new skills in a challenging economy

People all around the world have embraced new responsibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some continue to work providing needed goods and services, while others are discovering new ways their work can meet those needs while they are physically distant from their colleagues and those whom they serve. Some have embraced new roles caring for relatives and neighbors or educating children who are home from school. And far too many find themselves without work as businesses struggle and governments intervene to...

This machine could replace 8 million masks. The FDA slowed it down.

The United States is a land of plenty, but federal officials say it does not have all the medical equipment it needs to fight the coronavirus. With the government estimating the U.S. needs anywhere from 270 million to 3.5 billion additional face masks, one would think its top priority would be facilitating the creation of new masks and finding ways to reuse its existing supply—but developments this weekend indicate otherwise. The federal government initially mended that healthcare providers wear N95...

Government bailouts and debt: further thoughts on the coronavirus crisis

Rev. Robert Sirico, president and co-founder of the Acton Institute, reflects on the unprecedented levels of debt that our society is taking on in the name of fighting the coronavirus. How tolerant are we ing to the government’s interventions? What role does subsidiarity play in solving our problems? Be sure to check out the other videos in this series, linked below. Thoughts from Rev. Robert Sirico during the coronavirus pandemic How freer markets can help during the coronavirus crisis with...

Coronavirus quarantine: pontifical universities become enterprising in their instruction

Elias Sader (social sciences) and Eamonn Clark (theology) tell us how empty classrooms were immediately and smoothly substituted via digital instruction platforms. They remark how this has forced traditional teachers to e enterprising in their methodologies of instruction (especially with panying visuals) yet with some natural “learning curves” and unintended consequences. The good news is that the high-tech digital classroom models being developed and implemented may be a “beta test” for perfecting and later expanding some of the world’s best...

FAQ: Did Viktor Orbán just become a dictator?

On Monday, Hungary’s parliament passed a law aimed bating the coronavirus, which gives Prime Minister Viktor Orbán the power to rule by decree. Critics warn this law gives the prime minister dictatorial powers and could allow him to suppress opposition media outlets. Here are the facts you need to know. Did the government already have these powers? This bill significantly strengthens the powers the prime minister has. The Fundamental Law of Hungary already allows the government to declare a state...

Jon Basil Utley, RIP

I had the privilege of being close to Jon Basil Utley (1934-2020) for the last 25 years of his life. Even though we disagreed on a few topics, we always did it with a smile. It was more like a game between friendly tennis partners than a struggle to score political or intellectual points against each other. Several years ago I read Odyssey of a Liberal, the autobiography of his mother, Freda Utley. I mend the book to all who...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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 28, 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 28, 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 28, 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 28, 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 28, 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 28, 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 28, 2026

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 28, 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 28, 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 28, 2026