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What motivates America’s new socialists?

Is America having a “socialist moment”? There are currently more people who say they prefer socialism to capitalism (37 percent) than identify as evangelical Christians (32 percent). What is driving people who don’t even know what socialism means to prefer it to free enterprise? At the Library of Law and Liberty, James Rogers says it’s risk, not redistribution, that motivates America’s new socialists: My suspicion is that most Americans still don’t resent really rich people. They may envy them, but...

Crisis in Europe calls for a ‘creative minority’

Recently at Acton University, Samuel Gregg opened his lecture “Benedict XVI and the Crisis of Europe” by diving into the etymology of “crisis.” es from the Greek word krisis, which marks the point at which an illness has reached its peak. This peak is a turning point; it is the moment when the sick will either recover or die. Gregg claims that Europe is in a state of crisis. He outlines three major characteristics of its illness in order to...

Samuel Gregg: ‘On that strange, disturbing, and anti-American Civiltà Cattolica article’

On July 13th, Civiltà Cattolica,a Jesuit periodical from Rome, published an article that was largely critical of American culture. The very next day, Samuel Gregg, director of research at the Acton Institute, responded in the Catholic World Report with an article titled “On that strange, disturbing, and anti-American ‘Civiltà Cattolica’ article.” Gregg states: This brings me to a very odd article that recently appeared in La Civiltà Cattolica: the Italian Jesuit periodical published twice a month and which enjoys a...

3 reasons economic ‘inequality’ is misleading

Society praises equality as an absolute good. Certainly, equality before God and the law are pillars of a free society. However, measuring economic equality is often misleading for three key reasons. I was reminded of this by a new Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) report on e inequality in Great Britain released on Wednesday. The BBC’s headline “UK inequality reduced since 2008” typifies the media coverage. However, the study reveals that much of the leveling came about because the wealthiest...

Approaching climate change at Acton University

Jay Richards lecturing at Acton University How should we respond virtuously to the issue of climate change? During his lecture at Acton University on June 23, Jay Richards wrestled with this question before a nearly packed room. Richards is an author, assistant research professor in the School of Business and Economics at The Catholic University of America, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and executive editor of The Stream. During his talk, Richards outlined four questions that he thinks...

NBC’s Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly profiles Boys’ Latin Charter School

In June, Sarah Stanley, managing editor of Acton’s Religion and Liberty, wrote an article onBoys’ Latin of Philadelphia Charter School. Her piece, titled “Every man is the architect of his own fortune,” interviews the co-founder and CEO of Boys’ Latin, David Hardy, who started the school in 2007 with the belief that teaching Latin and enforcing a strict code of conduct could provide a better future to young men from munities. He was largely correct. NBC’s Megyn Kelly recently used...

Deirdre McCloskey’s case for ‘humane libertarianism’

In Deirdre McCloskey’s latest book, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, she adds a hearty layer to her ongoing thesis about the sources of our newfound prosperity. In an age where Left and Right seem intent on focusing merely on the material means and ends, McCloskey reminds us of the underlying forces at play, arguing that such prosperity is not due to systems, tools, or materials, but to the ideas, virtues, and rhetoric behind them....

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 2026

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 10, 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 10, 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 10, 2026