RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Learning to love institutions in an age of individualism
In the wake of rapid globalization and widespread consolidation, many have grown weary of human institutions, whether in business, religion, politics, or beyond. Threatened by their structure and slowness, we have tended to detach ourselves, opting instead for more “organic” approaches to human interaction. These “bottom-up” countermeasures surely have their value and necessity, but our modern resistance has also created a certain societal vacuum. Indeed, as our culture continues to fragment—increasingly defined by social isolationandpublic distrust—it is the places with...
Does capitalism always become crony?
Mark Zuckerberg has finally admitted he needs help. From the government. After years of shady dealing, data collection, and intentionally designing addictive technologies, Zuckerberg has asked the government to regulate tech. And who do you think will help write all the regulation that “regulates” all these tech firms? Bureaucrats in Washington won’t have enough knowledge, of course, so they’ll have to get it from experts in the tech industry. Lucky tech industry. Now that Facebook and Google, et al., have...
What Christians should know about the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)
Note: This is the latest entry in the Acton blog series, “What Christians Should Know About Economics.” For other entries inthe series seethis post. What it means: The Earned e Tax Credit (EITC) is a refundable federal tax credit available to eligible workers earning relatively low wages. (Tax credits provide a dollar-for dollar reductionof your e tax liability.) The Explanation: As the Congressional Research Service (CRS) points out, the EITC has evolved from a relatively modest tax benefit to a...
Alejandro Chafuen in Forbes: Think tanks and social media
Alejandro Chafuen, Acton’s Managing Director, International, writes today in Forbes with his annual analysis of think tanks’ use of social media. While social media stats shouldn’t be our only or even primary measure of success, no one can deny the prevalence of social networks in today’s world, and many groups expend considerable energy in their efforts in this field. The prehensive ranking of think tanks is produced by the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania....
Is there an actual conservative alternative to markets?
After the second World War, support for free markets and modern conservatism became more prominent—and both were often interlinked. But skepticism, if not outright rejection, of free markets has remained an undercurrent in a large section of the conservative movement. This has e increasingly noticeable in the past few years as many on the right have rushed to embrace statist ideologies, such as nationalism and populism. Yet while criticisms abound, there are few workable alternatives being offered by conservatives to...
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...
Mar 3, 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...
Mar 3, 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....
Mar 3, 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,...
Mar 3, 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...
Mar 3, 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...
Mar 3, 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...
Mar 3, 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...
Mar 3, 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...
Mar 3, 2026
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