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Have Faith in America: Obama, Coolidge, and Restoring National Confidence

President Obama has been re-elected, and as mentators point out, he faces a nation even more divided than when he took office. In his victory speech, the President’s message came back to unity, how “we rise and fall together as one nation and as one people.” es, I should note, after a campaign that sought to demonize the rich and downplay the efforts of the entrepreneur. For those who believe es from a full-scope appreciation of mankind, from the minimum-wage...

Rev. James V. Schall: ‘A Final Gladness’

On Dec. 7, Rev. James V. Schall, S.J., will deliver his last lecture at Georgetown University in Washington as he prepares for retirement. A great friend of Acton, Rev. Schall will be speaking in Gaston Hall in a lecture titled “A Final Gladness.” A good turnout is expected so register in advance by contacting [email protected] by Nov. 28. To see an archive of Rev. Schall’s Acton articles, please go to this link. From his Georgetown bio: Father Schall’s interests include...

Did Florida Disenfranchise African-American Voters?

For 159 years, the state of Florida attempted to disenfranchise it’s citizens by suppressing voter turnout.At least that’s the logical conclusion that can be drawn from the recent partisan claims about voter suppression in the state. As part of it’s post-2000 election reforms, Florida officially implemented early voting for the 2004 election. Until then, voters had to vote absentee or on Election Day. But as a cost-cutting measure, the state legislature passed a law in 2011 reducing the early voting...

ResearchLinks – 11.09.12

Article: “The Ethics of Digital Preservation” Peter Johan Lor and J.J. Britz. “An ethical perspective on political-economic issues in the long-term preservation of digital heritage.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61, no. 11 (November 2012): 2153-2164. The article provides an overview of the main ethical and associated political-economic aspects of the preservation of born-digital content and the digitization of analogue content for purposes of preservation. The term “heritage” is used broadly to include scientific and...

Opposition to Obamacare is ‘Effort to Impose Religious Views’

John Kennedy, president and CEO of Autocam and Autocam Medical in Grand Rapids, MI, recently filed suit over the HHS mandate requiring employers to provide artificial birth control, abortifacients and abortions as part of medical care coverage. On Wednesday, government attorneys explained the rejection of his suit, on the basis that it had no merit. The government contends that provisions of the law that form Kennedy’s objections “are intended to help ensure that women have access to health coverage, without...

The Election’s Biggest Losers

Mitt Romney may have lost to Barack Obama but his was not the biggest loss of the election—at least not economically. Despite the millions the GOP spent to elect their candidate, the real economic losers of the 2012 election, as Joel Kotkin explains, are entrepreneurs: The real losers are small business owners, or what might be called the aspirational middle class. The smaller business — with no galleon full of legal slaves pulling for them — will face more regulation...

Has Free Replaced Freedom?

Mississippi State Senator Chris McDaniel has written a solid essay asking “Is ‘free’ now more important than ‘freedom?” It’s a serious and much needed indictment against our culture and the political class. McDaniel is a deep thinker and his work has been highlighted on the PowerBlog before. Below is an excerpt from his recent essay: Building on their principle of self-rule, we have always understood the need for balance between freedom and order; and we built our hopes on a...

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...

Feb 25, 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,...

Feb 25, 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...

Feb 25, 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....

Feb 25, 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...

Feb 25, 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...

Feb 25, 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...

Feb 25, 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...

Feb 25, 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...

Feb 25, 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...

Feb 25, 2026