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“Just last week I was telling a colleague that I hoped Paul Romer would finally win the Nobel prize in economics,” says Victor V. Claar in this week’s Acton Commentary. “And then he did.” I’ve been a Paul Romer fan since I started teaching intermediate macroeconomics more than a decade ago—the “macro” course college students might take following the introductory one. Because most economics teaching involves good storytelling, I’ve thought a lot about how Romer fits into the story of...

Philip Booth: How we can reclaim ‘social justice’

The term “social justice” has a richly developed history in Christian thought, with application for every level of society. However, activists with less-than-heavenly aims have invoked the phrase to justify their activism, from Fr. Charles Coughlin to modern-day antifa rioters. AtReligion & Liberty Transatlantictoday, Philip Booth, says the misapplication of this term impoverishes all of society – both literally by inspiring counterproductive economic policies and figuratively by depriving citizens of their proper role in bringing about social justice. Booth, a...

Brazil’s conservatives mount a counter-revolution

Writing to a friend about his pessimism regarding the future of Western Civilization, Jacob Burckhardt made an interesting observation. The Swiss historian believed that history was not a linear process and that he could see that sometimes that Providence contains some surprises for us. It is with bination of surprise and pessimism that we should analyze the Brazilian presidential election in which Jair Bolsonaro, a populist candidate with conservative tendencies, who made the defense of traditional Christian values the main...

Victory for Christian bakers, religion and property rights at UK Supreme Court

This morning, the UK Supreme Court ruled on behalf of Ashers Baking Company, a Christian-run family bakery in Belfast that refused to bake a cake with the message, “Support Gay Marriage.” The court found that its owners, the McArthur family, have the right to refuse to proclaim messages they oppose, as do all UK citizens whether on in favour of or against same-sex marriage. Rev. Richard Turnbull, a trustee of the organization that represented the family, reveals the details and...

Why now is the time to fight the evil of unemployment

Last Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the unemployment rate dropped to 3.7 percent in September, a low not seen since 1969. Many of us (including me, I was born in 1969) have never seen the unemployment rate this low in our entire lives. This is great news for America. But it’s also a problem—and an opportunity. The problem is that we may think we don’t need to be concerned about unemployment. In a sense, this is true....

Samuel Gregg: What is crony capitalism?

In an interview for Guatemala’s Universidad Francisco Marroquin, Samuel Gregg, the Director of Research here at the Acton Institute, answered questions about crony capitalism, mentioning how it works and his worries about this problem. Gregg explains crony capitalism by contrasting it with the free market and political market. He mentions how it works in the economy, what happens in the marketplace when it’s used, and why it’s a problem for both the people doing business and for entrepreneurs. ...

How Michigan’s licensing laws hinder the disadvantaged

Proponents of greater government intervention often argue that some freedoms are well worth sacrificing for greater social stability or public health and safety. Such is particularly the case with occupational licensing and other micro-regulations, where the government routinely imposes barriers with the stated aims of “protecting consumers” or “stabilizing industries.” But while such regulations may overly technical and practical, the cost of the corresponding freedoms is far from abstract. It’s personal—felt in the form of new economic obstacles for the...

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...

Jul 4, 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...

Jul 4, 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...

Jul 4, 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,...

Jul 4, 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...

Jul 4, 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...

Jul 4, 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...

Jul 4, 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...

Jul 4, 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...

Jul 4, 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....

Jul 4, 2026