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‘Wandavision’ and the abundance of the heart

In its first show for the Disney+ streaming ic giant Marvel explores in the hit series Wandavision a depth of storytelling that reaches beyond the stereotypical good-versus-evil battle of so many superhero tales. It explores the inseparability of human creativity and the condition of our hearts. The final episode was released on March 5. This post contains spoilers. Wandavision features the Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), and the Vision (Paul Bettany), two secondary (though not anymore, I hope) heroes...

Exile in the ‘Seven Mountains’: beyond a politics of domination

As American culture has grown increasingly hostile to Christianity, many have responded with calls to “take our country back” for God, promoting a mix of tailored strategies to dominate specific sectors of society – from politics, to business, to the media and beyond. The efforts vary in their energy and effectiveness, but as cultural elites give way to various forms bative conformity, Christians appear to be ever more drawn to their own spiritualized versions of the same. In assessing such...

Rev. Robert Sirico: The spiritual secrets of business success

What are the keys to properly analyzing business opportunities, discovering new markets, and troubleshooting barriers to growth? Business degrees, books, and seminars may equip leaders with a technical knowledge of these problems – but in a new podcast, Acton Institute President and Co-founder Rev. Robert A. Sirico identifies two core mental and spiritual traits that incline entrepreneurs toward success. Rev. Sirico joined best-selling author and top-rated Forbes leadership speaker Brad Formsma in episode 64 of “The Wow Factor,” a podcast...

‘Education Reimagined’: West Virginia’s quest for school choice

West Virginia’s schools have historically ranked among the lowest in the nation, even as spending per student continues to rate well above the national average. Unfortunately, instead of pushing for reform, teachers unions and state legislators have fought vigorously to protect the status quo. In 2018, teachers went on strike for nine days, demanding higher pay and better benefits. In 2019, they stayed home again, protesting the state’s decision to legalize charter schools and offer various alternatives. This past January,...

Nun: Abortion-funding stimulus is ‘the faithful answer’ to COVID-19

The Senate passed the “American Rescue Plan” on Saturday without the Hyde Amendment, a legislative rider that protects taxpayers from having to fund abortion-on-demand. However, a prominent Roman Catholic nun has celebrated the $1.9 trillion stimulus package, calling on “every single member of Congress” to vote for it and saying the abortion-funding measure makes strides toward “ending child poverty.” The current version of the American Rescue Plan contains $414 billion in taxpayer dollars not subject to Hyde Amendment protections, possibly...

We can’t put a federal price tag on parenting

As the end of the COVID-19 pandemic is in sight and we see some hope on the horizon, politicians in our nation’s capital are considering significant proposals to address the crises of the working poor and child poverty. The plans, most prominently those championed by President Joe Biden and Sen.Mitt Romney, focus on both the particular challenges of the pandemic as well as the ongoing and structural difficulties of work and parenting in our modern economy. Although they differ in...

Explainer: The American Rescue Plan, the child tax credit, and child poverty

On Thursday, President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, one day after the House of Representatives passed the $1.9 trillion stimulus by a vote of 220-211. Its supporters, especially those on the Religious Left, assert that the bill’s changes to the child tax credit represent the best way to reduce child poverty. What changes does the American Rescue Plan make to child tax credit? How much money could families expect to get, and when? Is the glowing analysis of...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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 15, 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 15, 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 15, 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 15, 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 15, 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 15, 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 15, 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 15, 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...

May 15, 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 15, 2026