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Unemployment as economic-spiritual indicator — December 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...

6 Quotes by Teddy Roosevelt on virtue and character

Yesterday was the centennial anniversary of the death of Theodore Roosevelt. There are many areas of policy and politics where those of us at the Acton Institute would differ with America’s 26th president. But we share mitment to virtue and character, and its importance for both individual flourishing and for public life. In honor of this anniversary, here are six quotes by Roosevelt on those character and virtue: On virtue and success in life: “There are many qualities which we...

Is capitalism making us fat?

As workers emerge from the holidays an average of one pound heavier, weight loss tops every list of New Year’s resolutions. Yet in 2019, physicians are asking politicians to classify obesity as a disease to be treated by taxing sugary foods – and mentators are blaming our penchant for overindulgence on the capitalist system. If obesity is a disease, then in the West it is an epidemic. Some 40 percent of Americans and 30 percent of adults in the UK...

Explainer: What you should know about the U.S. president’s emergency powers

What just happened? Last Friday President Trump said he was considering using his national emergency powers to secure funding for the construction of a border wall between U.S.-Mexico border. “We can call a national emergency and build it very quickly,” said the president. What are national emergency powers? The President of the United States has certain powers that may be exercised in the event that the nation is threatened by crisis, exigency, or emergency circumstances (other than natural disasters, war,...

Alejandro Chafuen in Forbes: The U.S. economy in 2019 – challenges and lower expectations

Where is the economy heading in 2019? Changes in economic growth are much less volatile than the performance of stock markets. In order to forecast what will happen in an economy it is better to focus on the fundamentals, which is to say, examining causes rather than effects. In my forecast for 2018, I included as a factor of my optimism the increase in value of U.S. stocks during the first years of the presidency of Donald J. Trump. This...

Criminal justice reform: Possible effects of the First Step Act

This is part three of a series on criminal justice reform. The First Step Act was one of the last laws passed by the 115th Congress and signed by President Trump before the current federal government shutdown. The act, which largely focuses on recidivism reduction through prison reform and some sentencing reforms, is also notable for the generally bipartisan support it received. In this finalpart of a three-part series on criminal justice reform, we’ll consider some of the implications of...

Alejandro Chafuen in Forbes: John Locke, Reason, Christianity and Christmas

John Locke is well-known as a philosopher. Perhaps less well-known, though, are the religious convictions that underlie many of his ideas. Alejandro Chafuen, Acton’s Managing Director, International, recently published an article in Forbes describing the influence of Locke’s Christianity on his views of the human person. Locke’s Christianity also shows in his mentaries and his thoughts on the birth of the Savior. Over the course of the last five years, I have been devoting my Christmas article to authors or...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Oct 22, 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...

Oct 22, 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...

Oct 22, 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...

Oct 22, 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...

Oct 22, 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...

Oct 22, 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....

Oct 22, 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...

Oct 22, 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,...

Oct 22, 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...

Oct 22, 2026