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Audio: Samuel Gregg and Tea Party Catholic on Relevant Radio

We’re continuing to round up appearances by Acton Director of Research Samuel Gregg as he does radio interviews nationwide to promote his latest book, Tea Party Catholic. This past Monday, Sam made an appearance on the Relevant Radio network showA Closer Look with SheilaLiaugminas.As usual, it was a wide-ranging and intelligent discussion, and you can listen to it via the audio player below. [product sku=”1415″] ...

Corporate Political Spending Report a Tool for Business Bullies

The 2013 “CPA-Zicklin Index of Corporate Policy Accountability and Disclosure” was issued Tuesday by the allegedly “nonpartisan” Center for Corporate Political Accountability – the “CPA” of the report’s title lest readers mistakenly read it as the objective analysis of a certified public accountant. The CPA referenced here is the organization operated by Bruce Freed, which shepherds proxy shareholder resolutions by left leaning “religious” shareholder activist groups as As You Sow and the Interfaith Council on Corporate Responsibility. I haven’t taken...

World Contraception Day: No Celebrating, Please

John Seager, president of Population Connection, has written an article at the Huffington Post regarding World Contraception Day. Entitled (and I don’t think he meant for this to be a non sequitur), “A World Without Contraception Is No Place For People,” Seager mournfully asks the reader to envision a world where there is no birth control because “right-wing anti-contraception crusaders” have gotten their way. Now, he says, sex is only for procreation. (I’m not sure where he got this assumption;...

Millennials, Vocation, and the Challenge of Economic Change

Earlier this week, Michael Hendrix offered some mentary on the economic future of millennials, fearing that many in our generation are in a similar position as “the horse at the advent of the automobile.” The economic horizon is shifting, and with such e new opportunities. Yet rather than being energized and agile in response, many are content to simply shrug and plod along. As Hendrix concludes, there’s hope in the reality that we are not horses, but creative, spiritual beings,...

What Happens To Kids After They’re Rescued From Sex Trafficking?

“Victims who are rescued from their captors can’t just return to regular life as though nothing happened,” notes Laura Willard. So what happens to them when they are saved from slavery? Love146, an organization that provides holistic care for survivors as they are reintegrated back munities, shares the tale of one woman’s recovery. [product sku=”1297″] ...

The Art Of Apple Picking And The Dignity Of Work

It is time to pick the apples. Row after row of trees, marked Gala and Honeycrisp and Red Delicious: an abundance of fruit that must be harvested in a relatively short time. And there is more to it than just yanking a piece of fruit off a branch: [T]he job is more difficult than you may think, so WZZM 13 sent reporter Stacia Kalinoski out into [orchard owner] May’s orchard to show what the work is really life… Stacia Kalinoski...

Free People are Still the Greatest Threat to Tyranny

There is little doubt that we will see more Sen. Ted Cruz like broadsides against Washington’s power structure. Obamacare might be the straw that broke the camel’s back when es to ceding power to Washington. A point that was made Ad nauseum during Cruz’s 20 hour plus talk fest on the Senate floor is that what he did matters little. Nothing would change from a legislative or a procedural standpoint. While I think that’s true for the short term, the...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 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 19, 2026