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In Praise of the Book . . . On World Book and Copyright Day

What would our life be without books? Books teach, entertain, encourage and give invaluable perspectives that allow each of us to grow and deepen our life and faith. If we asked every person who will read this blog post about their favorite book, we would get a rich tapestry of stories full of warm memories. And we are not alone in our love for books. Read a few of these wonderfully emotive quotes: The things I want to know are...

The Bible and the Budget

The Christian Post recently interviewed Acton’s Jordan Ballor about biblical principles and the federal budget: Ballor and Good were both in agreement with Sider that the large national debt, now over $15.6 trillion, is immoral in the way it passes debt from one generation to the next. Sider deserves a lot of praise, Ballor said in the interview, for bringing attention to the severity of the debt crisis. “This is absolutely a moral problem. We have an irresponsible government. It...

Orthodox Priest: Chuck Colson’s repentance ‘deep and lasting’

On the Observer, the blog of the American Orthodox Institute, Rev. Johannes L. Jacobse looks back on the life and the legacy of Chuck Colson: I heard him explain his experience in prison during one of his talks. It was the lowest point in his life where he had lost everything and began to question purpose, decisions, and direction. He was visited by a friend (former Minnesota Governor Al Quie) who shared with him how Jesus Christ came into the...

Chuck Colson: A Life Redeemed

mon thought many people have about conversion is that a person who has undergone the experience is wholly different before and after. Surely this is true in the order of grace, in that a man goes from darkness into light, from sin into being made cleansed. Yet, the personality remains the same even if it es reordered and redirected, sometimes astonishingly so. Such was the case with Peter, and with Paul, with Augustine and more contemporaneously, with my good friend...

How to Ruin the Military in One Easy Step

Since April is a time for Spring cleaning, the Washington Post asked a handful of writers what “unnecessary traditions, ideas and institutions” we should toss out with other clutter in our lives. Thomas E. Ricks, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, thinks we should discard the all-volunteer military. This is precisely the reason it is time to get rid of the all-volunteer force. It has been too successful. Our relatively small and highly adept military has made it all too easy for...

College-Age Millennials Are Losing Their Religion

Younger Millennials (ages 18-24) report significant levels of movement from the religious affiliation of their childhood, mostly toward identifying as religiously unaffiliated, according to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and Georgetown’s Berkley Center. The survey also finds that they support government intervention to address the gap between the rich and poor. Some of the highlights from the survey include: • While only 11% of Millennials were religiously unaffiliated in childhood, one-quarter (25%) currently identify as unaffiliated,...

New Video: Chuck Colson in ‘Like I Am’

Speaking of the time he spent in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal, Chuck Colson said: “I couldn’t have made it without Christ in my life, I know that. But I couldn’t have made it if there wasn’t in the back of my mind a belief that God had a purpose for this.” You’ll hear those words in “Like I Am,” a segment from the Acton Institute’s Our Great Exchange: Discover the Fullness of What it Means to...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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....

Nov 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...

Nov 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...

Nov 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...

Nov 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...

Nov 10, 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...

Nov 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...

Nov 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,...

Nov 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...

Nov 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...

Nov 10, 2026