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This Thanksgiving, be thankful for the low cost of food

Your Thanksgiving dinner this year may cost less than a meal at your local fast food restaurant. According to an informal price survey conducted by theAmerican Farm Bureau Federation(AFBF), the average cost of this year’s Thanksgiving meal for ten people is $49.12—less than $5 per person. “For the second consecutive year, the overall cost of Thanksgiving dinner has declined,” says AFBF Director of Market Intelligence John Newton. “The cost of the dinner is the lowest since 2013 and second-lowest since...

Video: Rev. Robert Sirico and R. R. Reno debate the merits of the free market

Free market economics is a subject worth repeatedly visiting, to examine its merits and question its possible drawbacks. The idea of free markets has e under fire by some conservative thinkers, including editor of First Things magazine, R. R. Reno, prompting a response in defense of free markets from Rev. Robert Sirico, co-founder and president of the Acton Institute. On November 7 and 8, Reno and Sirico were given the chance to discuss and defend their position on free markets....

The Communist who praised freedom, property, and morality

Today’s Religion & Liberty Transatlantic features a biography of the forgotten architect of perestroika, Alexander Yakovlev (1923-2005). Born to Communist parents, rising to e the head of propaganda in the Soviet Union, Yakovlev came to embrace freedom and expose the horrors of Marxist-Leninist rule – not least, the persecution of people of faith. In the pantheon of late figures who contributed to the fall of Communism, Yakovlev deserves more notoriety than he receives, argues Kaetana Leontjeva-Numaviciene in her essay. Although...

Report: Acton Institute No. 1 in West Michigan nonprofit ranking

In a survey of local charities and nonprofits in the West Michigan region, WZZM TV found that the Acton Institute topped 45 other organizations. David Bailey, an investigative reporter for the Grand Rapids, Michigan-based ABC affiliate, used data from the Charity Navigator nonprofit watchdog organization pile his ranking. You can see a full list of the West Michigan charities and nonprofits at the WZZM website. Here’s a transcript from Bailey’s report: At the top of our rankings is the Acton...

Religion & Liberty: Broetje’s big garden

Broetje Orchards For this fall edition of Religion & Liberty, the cover story focuses heavily on an autumn staple: the apple. Over the summer I observed an Acton-sponsored event for pastors in Walla Walla, Washington. During this event, several Acton staff and event attendees had a chance to tour Broetje Orchards in Prescott, Washington, and meet several members of the Broetje family. This family not only runs one of the biggest fruit providers in the nation but also constantly finds...

Post-Brexit, Daniel Hannan champions the moral case for free trade

In the immediate aftermath of the vote forBrexit, conservatives were quick to cheer Britain’s decision, hailing it as a win for freedom, democracy, and subsidiarity. Others, however, were just as eager to claim it was a move driven by fear and protectionism. Standing in the midst was Daniel Hannan, the British Conservative MEP, who insisted that the causes of national sovereignty and free exchange needn’t conflict. “Being a nation means that we are not just a random set of individuals...

The tradeoff between fun and wages

Note: This is post #57 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. If you had to choose, would you rather be a sewer inspector spending your days underground or a lifeguard on the beach? Most would say that being a lifeguard is a more fun job, but a sewer inspector has higher wages pensate for the less-fun aspects of the job. In this video, Marginal Revolution University discusses the tradeoff between fun and wages and show how this illustrates...

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...

Oct 18, 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...

Oct 18, 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...

Oct 18, 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....

Oct 18, 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...

Oct 18, 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...

Oct 18, 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...

Oct 18, 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...

Oct 18, 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...

Oct 18, 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,...

Oct 18, 2026