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This week, I was one of menters consulted in Nicholas Wolfram Smith’s article “FCC Repeal of Net Neutrality Leads to Lively Fight” for the National Catholic Register. I think Smith did a fine job conveying my primary concern: But according to Dylan Pahman, a researcher and managing editor of Acton Institute’s Journal of Markets & Morality, one of the problems with the 2015 net neutrality regulations was that it gave the government far too much regulatory power over ISPs. At...

Radio Free Acton: Greg Forster on the legacy of Whittaker Chambers, Econ Quiz on income inequality, Upstream on Ursula K. Le Guin

On this episode of Radio Free Acton, Paul Bonicelli, director of programs and education at Acton, and Trey Dimsdale, director of program outreach at Acton, speak with Greg Forster, director of the Oikonomia Network and visiting assistant professor of faith and culture at Trinity International University, on the legacy and modern relevance of Whittaker Chambers and his landmark book,Witness. Then, Dave Hebert, professor of economics at Aquinas college, joins us on the Econ Quiz segment to talkabout e inequality. Finally,...

Around the Old World-Sea

Later today we’re having a book launch discussion about the latest volume in the Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology, On Islam. This book is a selection from a travel narrative Kuyper published after he voyaged around the Mediterranean Sea in 1905-1906. For those who are unable to join us in Grand Rapids, the event will be available via a live stream and will also be archived for viewing later. For those interested in learning more about Kuyper’s trip,...

Oxfam’s ‘little gods’ exploit the poor

In a tragic irony, Oxfam has demonstrated the injustice of a certain kind of inequality. The international charity, which is known for its annual report on e inequality, is mired in scandal involving sexual coercion by its employees, possible pedophilia, and lying to a government agency in order to maintain taxpayer funding. While responding to the 2010 Haitian earthquake, relief workers engaged prostitutes in living quarters furnished by Oxfam, paid for with charitable donations (and tax dollars). Some have alleged...

Herman Bavinck on love, economics, and the reformation of society

When we think about markets, we often think only in terms of mathematics or money. But at a deeper level, markets are simply networks of human relationships. When we participate in economic activity, we aren’t just creating wealth; we are munities, cultures, and civilization, partnering with God and neighbor in a divine exchange of gifts, blessings, and love. Yes, love! Yet the mere existence of markets doesn’t mean that such love will manifest itself accordingly. For that, we’ll need to...

Rev. Sirico: What I learned from Michael Novak

Today is the first anniversary of the death of Michael Novak. The theologian, scholar, and writer was one of the most influential Catholic thinkers of his generation, and an indefatigable champion of free enterprise, democracy, and liberty. During his life Novak was a prolific writer. In addition to being the author or editor of more than 50 books, he wrote a syndicated column that was nominated for a Pulitzer. He was also a teacher (he taught at Harvard, Stanford, SUNY...

Can capitalism be saved from conservatives?

“The diversity of American conservatism would astound those pundits, politicians, and critics who believe conservatism is a rigid ideology aimed at privileging the wealthy (and the white),” says Gregory L. Schneider in this week’s Acton Commentary. Peter Kolozi’s new bookConservatives Against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalizationshowcases a conservatism fortable with free-market capitalism — which adherents see as revolutionary and disruptive of tradition — and traces its origins from the antebellum South, to the election of Donald Trump, profiling...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

May 20, 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...

May 20, 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...

May 20, 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...

May 20, 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,...

May 20, 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...

May 20, 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...

May 20, 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...

May 20, 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....

May 20, 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...

May 20, 2026