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Radio Free Acton: Discussion on the morality of free trade; Upstream on the letters of Russell Kirk

On this episode of Radio Free Acton, Tyler Groenendal, Foundation Relations Coordinator at Acton, speaks with Michael J. Clark, Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College, on the morality and importance of free trade. Then, on the Upstream segment, Bruce Edward Walker talks to Jim Person, author of the bookImaginative Conservatism: The Letters of Russell Kirk, about who Russell Kirk is and why he is still important today. Check out these additional resources on this week’s podcast topics: Read “Trump’s Tariffs...

If work is our ‘modern religion,’ leisure is not the cure

Americans are known forworking longer hours and taking less vacation time than their counterparts in the industrialized world. In response, many are quick to decry this fact as evidence of age-old desperation and newfound decadence. If people are working long and hard, there must be problem.But is this the only possible explanation? For Benjamin Hunnicutt, professor of leisure studies at the University of Iowa, the answer is a simple and resounding “yes.” Work has e a “modern religion,” he writes,...

Humanity’s biggest surprise: dematerialization

In 1865, W. Stanley Jevons predicted that with coal reserves of 90 billion tons, England would run out within 100 years. Today, the country has between three trillion and 23 trillion ton,enough to last Britain for centuries. In 1914, the Bureau of Mines fretted that with a total future production limit of 5.7 billion barrels, the U.S. only had about a ten-year supply of oil. Today, a hundred years later, we’re estimated to have36 billion barrels left in the ground....

Daniel Hannan explains why the EU is a hive of corruption

Two paths confront someone faced with an unwanted reality: reform or denial. With a report set to expose persistently high levels of corruption among its member states, the EU chose the latter option, its critics say. EU member states, programs, practices, institutions, and leaders stand accused of everything from bribery to larceny, from rigging the bidding process to influence peddling. Years ago, the mitted to report on, and reform, such practices. Instead, the EU chose to scupper the report. “In...

How Germany handles teacher strikes

As the U.S. school year wound to a close, teachers unions waged statewide strikes in West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma, and inspired associated teacher strikes in Colorado, Kentucky, and North Carolina. The walkouts, celebrated by the media as the “Red State Revolt,” received adulatory media coverage despite keeping millions of children out of school for bined total of more than a month. From across the Atlantic, the social democracy of Germany offered a much different response to teacher strikes. This...

How a virtual central bank may have created the Bitcoin bubble

Imagine if you could own pany that had the ability to print money—literally to create the equivalent of U.S. dollars out of thin air. Here’s how it could work: pany prints it own form of currency and sends it to another firm where the newly created pseudo-money is used to purchase assets. Because of supply and demand (and a bit of investor speculation), the buying drives up the asset’s price. After the price has risen, pany then sells the asset...

Edmund Burke: Philosopher for classical education

“While classical education has exploded in recent decades, this movement of diverse schools lacks a philosophical figure who centers the goals of classical education,” says Josh Herring in this week’s Acton Commentary. “Edmund Burke could fill that need.” Burke was a minority figure in his own day, speaking truth in opposition to those who praised the revolution. Classical education is also a minority movement in the Western world today. While writing about his own world at the turn towards modernity...

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...

Jul 7, 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...

Jul 7, 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 7, 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 7, 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 7, 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 7, 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 7, 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 7, 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 7, 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 7, 2026