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Have Christian Female Entrepreneurs Changed The World?

Christina M. Weber says that Christian women have been trail-blazers in showing us how to balance family life, work and worship. In the 20th century, Weber says that political ideologies tried to break down family life. Marxists munists promoted disconnection between children and their parents with patible work schedules. They also destabilized marriages with the encouragement of promiscuity and lust. The agenda—dependence on the state above family and God — fueled the economic and political goals of their leaders. But...

Michael Miller: First Reaction to Leaked Encyclical Draft

Michael Matheson Miller, Research Fellow and Director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute: “Pope Francis has spoken consistently about the need to end exclusion for the world’s poor. Since the environmental movement often neglects the challenges of the poor, it will be interesting to see how the encyclical addresses the call to environmental stewardship in the context of poverty and economic development. “ ...

How American Catholics View Pope Francis and Global Warming

Since Pope Francis will be addressing climate change later this week the Pew Research Center has released a survey showing what American Catholics think about boththe pontiff and global warming. Not surprisingly, the surveyfound that global warming is a “highly politicized issue that sharply divides American Catholics, like the U.S. public as a whole, mainly along political party lines.” About seven-in-ten U.S. Catholics (71 percent) believe the planet is getting warmer, and nearly half (47 percent) attribute itto human causes....

Kishore Jayabalan: Initial Thoughts on Encyclical Leak

Kishore Jayabalan, Director of Istituto Acton in Rome: “The fact that this draft has been leaked well in advance of the encyclical’s official release shows the great interest in what Pope Francis has to say about the environment. To be sure, he will frame the issues in Christian terms, as the pope must always do. My concern is that he will blame the market economy for basically all our environmental degradation and neglect the very important role private property and...

Audio: Kishore Jayabalan With Al Kresta on Laudato Si, Capitalism, and Catholicism

Acton University 2015 is about to get underway at DeVos Place in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and our friend Al Kresta has already taken up residence on the gallery overlook level for his week ofKresta in the Afternoonremote broadcasts. His first guest from Acton University was our own Kishore Jayabalan, director of Istituto Acton in Rome, who sat down for a twenty minute discussion of Pope Francis, Laudeto Si, and patibility of capitalism with Christianity. The full interview is available via...

Why the Price System is One of God’s Artworks

At an auction in2007Andreas Gursky turned 99 cents into $3.34 million. Well, sort of. Perhaps it’d be more accurate to say he turned99 Cent II Diptychon, a photograph depicting an interior of a supermarket, into a few million. At the time this was the most expensive photograph in the world. Even more amazing is that this wasthe third print of the same image that had sold for millions. Two others sold in 2006, one for $2.25 million and another for...

Will That College Diploma Get You A Job?

Does having a college diploma mean you are ready for the workforce? It depends on who you ask. If you ask those involved with higher education, almost 75 percent say, “yes.” However, both students and employers are less sure: less than 60 percent of those groups feel college grads are well-prepared for a professional career. What are employers looking for, if not a diploma? They want proficiency in four key munication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking. With colleges and universities...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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 15, 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 15, 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 15, 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 15, 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 15, 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 15, 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 15, 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 15, 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 15, 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...

Dec 15, 2025