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The 5 deep spiritual reasons we love ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’

Over the last century no movie has been more synonymous with the Christmas season than It’s a Wonderful Life. It endures, more than seven decades after its release, because it strikes at least five deep spiritual chords in every human heart. (It bears noting: A copyright lapse allowed this modestly successful movie to e a staple of holiday programming for generations. ) It’s a tale of sacrifice, and choosing well It’s a Wonderful Life chronicles George Bailey’s evolution from a...

The legacy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; The human cost of unemployment, Part I

On this episode of Radio Free Acton, John Couretas, Acton’s director munications, talks with Daniel J. Mahoney, professor of political science at Assumption College, about the legacy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in light of Solzhenitsyn’s memoir recently released in English, “Between Two Millstones Book I: Sketches of Exile,” the first of two books in which Solzhenitsyn recounts his exile in the West. Afterwards, reporter Anne Marie Schieber takes us on the first of a three-part series exploring the difficulty of unemployment....

UK govt to investigate global Christian persecution

As the Westcontinues to celebrate the 12 days of Christmas which extend into the New Year,some 215 million Christiansworldwide face violence or repression. On the day after Christmas, the Britishgovernment launched a review of Christian persecution in “key countries” –especially in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa – and to seek ways the UK canhelp those who are suffering. Christianity is on the“verge of extinction in its birthplace,” saidForeign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who ordered the report. “So often the persecution...

Top 10 PowerBlog posts for 2018

As e near to the end of another year, we want to thank readers of PowerBlog for menting, and sharing our posts over the past twelve months. If you’re a new reader we encourage you to catch up by checking out our top ten most popular posts for 2018. #1 — Justice Alito exposes the hypocrisy of liberal double-standards Joe Carter You probably haven’t even heard about it, but yesterday there was an exchange in the Supreme Court that future...

Criminal justice reform: What does economics have to say?

This is part two of a series on criminal justice reform. Read part one here. For many, crime and criminal justice are not obvious economic issues, despite their effects on public budgets due to the cost of courts, policing, investigating crimes, and much more. Private efforts impose significant costs, as well, whether from house alarms, flood lights, or door locks, not to mention the costs incurred by victims. But costs such as these are not the primary source of economic...

A ‘wonderful world’ greets us in 2019

Just after the ball drops in Times Square in New York City, it has e a traditional to follow the singing of “Auld Lang Syne” by playing Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” No song could better capture the prosperous world that greets 2019, writes Philip Booth, Ph.D., in an essay posted today on the Acton Institute’s Religion& LibertyTransatlanticwebsite. Booth relates a number of statistics that show the world has improved and shows signs it will continue improving — before...

5 Good news stories from 2018 you might have missed

Half the world is now middle class or wealthier For the first time since agriculture-based civilization began 10,000 years ago, the majority of humankind is no longer poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty. By our calculations, as of this month, just over 50 percent of the world’s population, or some 3.8 billion people, live in households with enough discretionary expenditure to be considered “middle class” or “rich.” Population without access to electricity falls below 1 billion In a sign...

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,...

Apr 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...

Apr 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...

Apr 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...

Apr 4, 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...

Apr 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...

Apr 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...

Apr 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...

Apr 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...

Apr 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....

Apr 4, 2026