RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
The Social Capital Project: Reviving ‘associational life’ in America
Over the past few decades, America has experienced a wave of drastic economic and social disruption. In our search for solutions, we’ve tended to look either to ourselves orthe State, resulting in a clash between individualism and collectivism that forgets or neglects the space between. But what might be happening (or not happening) in those middle layers of society, from families to churches to charities to our economic activities? What might we be missing or forgetting about in those mediating...
How anti-Catholic bias from 140 years ago affects Protestant religious freedom today
WhenJames Blaineintroduced his ill-fatedconstitutional amendmentin 1875, he probably never would have imagined the unintended consequences it would have over a hundred years later. Blaine wanted to prohibit the use of state funds at “sectarian” schools (a code word for Catholic parochial schools) in order to inhibit immigration. Since the public schools instilled a Protestant Christian view upon its students, public education was viewed as a way to stem the tide of Catholic influence. While the amendment passed by a large...
What that viral ‘wealth inequality’ video gets wrong
Globalization does not merely mean petition; it also means that the best minds from around the world can collaborate and, when necessary, correct one another’s conclusions. Scientists rely on this interplay of minds but so do other disciplines, not least economics, where clear thinking is perpetually in short supply. A foreign free-market think tank has made a e critique of a viral video titled “Wealth Inequality in America,” which has racked up more than 20 million views on YouTube. The...
Should Martha Stewart iron her own shirts?
Note: This is post #33 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. Comparative advantage explains why people trade and what goods they should trade. To illustrate the concept parative advantage, Marginal Revolution University’s Alex Tabarrok asks, “Should Martha Stewart iron her own shirts?” Even if Martha Stewart has an absolute advantage in ironing shirts, her opportunity cost is simply too high. (If you find the pace of the videos too slow, I’d mend watching them at 1.5 to 2...
Understanding the President’s Cabinet: Vice President
Note: This is the post #17 in a weekly series of explanatory posts on the officials and agencies included in the President’s Cabinet. See the series introductionhere. Cabinet position:Vice President (VPOTUS) Current: Mike Pence Succession:The Vice President is second in the presidential line of succession. Primary Duties:The Vice President is also the President of the Senate, and in this role has two primary functions: to cast a vote in the event of a Senate deadlock (which Pence has done twice)...
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....
Jun 9, 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...
Jun 9, 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...
Jun 9, 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,...
Jun 9, 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...
Jun 9, 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...
Jun 9, 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...
Jun 9, 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...
Jun 9, 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...
Jun 9, 2025
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