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Unemployment as economic-spiritual indicator — November 2018 report

Series Note: Jobs are one of the most important aspects of a morally functioning economy. They help us serve the needs of our neighbors and lead to human flourishing both for the individual and munities. Conversely, not having a job can adversely affect spiritual and psychological well-being of individuals and families. Because unemployment is a spiritual problem, Christians in America need to understand and be aware of the monthly data on employment. Each month highlight the latest numbers we need...

7 Figures: Income and poverty in the U.S. from 2013-2017

The U.S. Census Bureau released the 2013-2017American Community Survey, which contains five-year estimates of e and poverty in the United States. Here are seven figures from the report you should know: 1. paring the 2013-2017 period to the 2008-2012 period, median household e increased in 16.6 percent of all counties (521 counties) between the 2008-2012 period and the 2013-2017 period. paring the 2013-2017 period to the 2008-2012 period, median household e declined in 222 counties (7.1 percent). 2.For the 2013...

Great Dominicans, Good Society: Successful Acton Rome conference

On Tuesday, the Acton Institute and its Rome office concluded another very successful international conference, Freedom, Virtue and the Good Society: The Dominican Contribution. The 380-person overflow attendance at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (the Angelicum) included participants from the Angelicum itself and other pontifical universities, various religious and missionary orders, diverse sectors of business, non-profits and political leadership, as well as representatives from diplomatic corps to the Holy See. The Angelicum’s Dean of Social Sciences, Fr. Alejandro...

The return of ‘Tariff Man’, nemesis of the poor

“I am a tariff man,” said the Republican president. He based his strong support of tariffs on the idea that industries within the U.S. needed “protection” from petition. A vocal opponent of free trade, his view was that America could tax its way to prosperity. Prices on consumer good rose, which helped to cause the Republicans to lose their majority in the House. But “tariff man” never wavered from his protectionist impulses, no matter how much damage they caused. By...

Against consumption Phariseeism: When minimalism and materialism collide

In a recent reflection on Christmastime consumerism, I explored the underlying challenges and opportunities of creativity and generosity in a free economy, arguing that the forces of materialism can be e if we maintain the right heart/mind orientation. “Economic growth and increasing prosperity are not identical with consumerism,” writes John Bolt in Economic Shalom. “Though it is a demanding challenge, one can be both wealthy and a faithful steward of God’s gifts.” Yet, lest we forget, such an integration is...

The Christian life and the common good

In this week’s Acton Commentary I show that the idea that “physical needs must be met before people experience spiritual needs” is older than Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. The key to understanding how this might be lies in a distinction between the order of time and the order of being. The church father Augustine noted that such distinctions have some important social and economic implications. Even though the mouse is higher on the chain of being than the piece...

Maslow, material needs, and the gospel

“Human beings are created with bodies and souls,”says Jordan Ballor in this week’s Acton Commentary. “We have both material and spiritual needs.” Earlier this year, Susan Mettes of Christianity Today critiqued the use of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a ministry tool. The central idea of the hierarchy, as Mettes puts it, is “that physical needs must be met before people experience spiritual needs.” Mettes argues against such a dualistic perspective, and instead points out that the Bible places a...

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 29, 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 29, 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 29, 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 29, 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 29, 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 29, 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 29, 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 29, 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 29, 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 29, 2026