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4 Lessons We Can Learn from a McDonald’s Owner

You’ve probably never heard of Tony Castillo. Even if you live in West Michigan and have eaten at one of his three McDonald’s franchises you probably don’t recognize the name. But an inspiring profile of Castillo by MLive provides a number of lessons about economics and business that everyone should learn from this entrepreneur. Lesson #1: To be a successful business owner you should care about your stakeholders (customers, employees, suppliers, etc.) Ask Tony Castillo what he loves about owning...

Winners of 2014 Mini-Grants on Free Market Economics

The Acton Institute Mini-Grants on Free Market Economics Program accepts proposals from business and economics faculty members at Christian colleges, seminaries, and universities in the United States and Canada in order to promote the scholarship and teaching of market economics. This program allows for collaboration between faculty from different universities, as well as allow future leaders to emerge, strengthen, and expand the existing network of scholars within economics. Entrants may submit proposals in two broad categories: Course development and faculty...

VA Healthcare: One Scary Profile of Bureaucratic Body Counts

This is only one powerful and horrific story that highlights the severe problems with Veterans Affairs Medical Centers. Unfortunately, there are easily thousands of stories like the one experienced by this veteran. Kay Daly sums it up well in the article from the American Thinker, Fighting a bureaucracy the size of the VA leviathan is not only physically exhausting, it is soul crushing as well. My brother was literally losing his will to live. That’s what I saw in the...

Income Inequality: You Can’t Handle The Truth

The rich get richer and the rest of us…well, we struggle along. Shouldn’t those with more money be spreading it out a bit more? My coffers clink with spare change; I sure could use some of that money. It only seems fair, right? Peter Morici, at Breitbart News, tackles the truth of e inequality. Those of us in the “rest of us” category are getting crushed by monopolies, unjust taxation, and political corruption. That, Morici says, is the truth of...

All Is Gift: How Our Work Sings of God’s Presence

“All that exists is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s munion with God…God blesses everything He creates, and, in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation.” -Alexander Schmemann, from For the Life of the World In Episode 1 of For the Life of the World, a new series from the Acton Institute, Evan Koons discovers...

Don’t Let That Kid Out Of Your Sight: Taking Helicopter Parenting To A New Level

I am not now nor have I ever been a helicopter parent. With five kids, I often depended on them to keep an eye on each other. They had the usual share of bumps, bruises, stitches and lowered grades because of forgotten homework that I refused to bring to school (failure is a good teacher.) Since they’ve all reached adulthood or near adulthood, I believe my husband and I followed the right path. But helicopter parenting (you know, those moms...

Is Godzilla Good for the Economy?

The gorilla-whale is back. And he’s here to stimulate the economy. On Friday, theaters across the country will be debuting the fourth American remake of Godzilla (the name is a romanization of the original Japanese name “Gojira” — which is bination of two Japanese words: gorira (‘gorilla’) and kujira (‘whale’). Over its opening weekend the film is projected to earn $78,000,000, and cumulative revenues of over $240,000,000. While that could be a generous stream of e for Hollywood, it’s a...

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,...

Mar 16, 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...

Mar 16, 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...

Mar 16, 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...

Mar 16, 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...

Mar 16, 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....

Mar 16, 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...

Mar 16, 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...

Mar 16, 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...

Mar 16, 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...

Mar 16, 2026