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Bernie Sanders’s workers wanted $15 an hour—so he cut their hours

On Friday I mentioned the ongoing labor dispute between the workers and management of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. The longtime advocate of raising the federal minimum to $15 an hour is finding that it’s easy plain about greedy employers until you e the one having to make payroll. Presidential campaigns are labor intensive and require an army of low-skilled workers who are willing to work long hours performing rote and mundane task. But as Sanders has discovered, paying for such...

Christianity in Iraq: The brutal truth

When es to understanding the present plight of Middle-Eastern Christianity, one author to whom I usually turn is Father Benedict Kiely. He’s the founder of Nasarean.org, which tries to help persecuted Christians in the Middle East. Sometimes Kiely’s observations are difficult to read, not least because they force Western Christians to face up to the full nature of the plight confronting their confreres that no amount of happy-talk can quite disguise. In a recent Catholic Herald article entitled “The Harsh...

New resources to understand ‘Nordic socialism’

Up to 20 forms of life are likely to survive a nuclear war: strains of bacteria, certain insects, and the myth of Nordic socialism. Despite those nations’ most dogged attempts to educate North Americans that they are not socialist, the idea that they present a model of “successful socialism” persists. Three new resources can deepen our understanding of the issue. The pares the tax rates of Sweden with the UK. True, the UK has slightly higher e inequality as measured...

Minority views? Priceless

There’s something in our DNA to feel threatened by ideas that challenge our own. History is haunted by tragic examples of the suppression of minority views, whether it be Athens killing Socrates (399 BC), the Roman Inquisition’s placing Galileo under house arrest for advocating heliocentrism (1632), Nazi book burning (1933), or the persecution of many thousands of academics during the Cultural Revolution (1966). The suppression of minority views is a perennial issue, and it usually takes place in much less...

5 facts about the Apollo 11 moon landing

This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, when astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins became the first people in history to land on the Moon. Here are five facts you should know about the most famous manned space mission. 1. The Apollo 11 mission was carried out by three mander Neil Armstrong, lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin, mand module pilot Mike Collins. But the team that took them to the moon included more than...

The Imaginative Conservative reviews Samuel Gregg’s new book

Dwight Longenecker of The Imaginative Conservative published a detailed review of Samuel Gregg’s new book, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization. He presents a summary of the book, praises Dr. Gregg for his work, and offers his mentary on the matters presented in the book. Longenecker writes, After an opening chapter which uses Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg address to introduce the threats to Western civilization, Dr. Gregg goes on to explain the unique cultural chemistry that brought about...

Bernie Sanders cares more about unions than he does his own workers

Who would have predicted that the hottest labor dispute of the summer would be between the workers and management of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign? Sanders is a long-time champion of raising the federal minimum to $15 an hour, so his campaign workers assumed they’d earn that level of pay too: Campaign field hires have demanded an annual salary they say would be equivalent to a $15-an-hour wage, which Sanders for years has said should be the federal minimum. The organizers...

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 27, 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 27, 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 27, 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 27, 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 27, 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 27, 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 27, 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 27, 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 27, 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 27, 2025