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What the Church Offers Those Left Behind by Technological Change

Where can people turn when technology eliminates their jobs? Greg Forster argues the answer is the “church.” Forster offers five things the church can be for those whose jobs are eliminated or endangered by technological change: The church can be a place where people find their true identity. The church can be a place where people find healing. The church can be a place where people find wisdom and vision. The church can be a place of cultural entrepreneurship. The...

What Happened to the Bill of Rights?

When the Founding Fathers were drafting the U.S. Constitution, they didn’t initially consider adding a Bill of Rights to protect citizens because it was deemed unnecessary. It was only afterthe Constitution’s supporters realized such a bill was essential to getting approved by the states that they proposed enumerating such rights in twelve amendments. (Ten amendments were ratified; two others, dealing with the number of representatives and with pensation of senators and representatives, were not.) The Bill of Rights was included...

5 Reasons Why Christians Should Care About Economics

I recently pointed to a helpful talk by Greg Forster to highlight how understanding economics is essential for developing a holistic theology of work, vocation, and stewardship. Economics connects the personal to the public, and prods our attentions and imaginations to the broader social order. In doing so, it alerts us to a unique and powerful mode of Christian mission. In his latest book, Flourishing Faith: A Baptist Primer On Work, Economics, And Civic Stewardship, Chad Brand expands on this...

A Note of Thanks

There’s a good deal of new research that connects things like happiness and satisfaction to experiences rather than to material goods. If you want to be happy, the advice goes, buy experiences, not things. There’s some truth to this, of course, but the reality is a bit plex. After all, don’t you also have “experiences” when you use “things”? In fact, I want to take a moment to write a brief note of thanks for a little material item that...

Jonathan Witt: Free Economy Equals Clean Water

At The Stream, Jonathan Witt questions why nations with free economies have cleaner water. After all, wouldn’t it seem more likely that countries with heavy government regulations regarding the environment have cleaner water? An examination of the most polluted rivers and streams in the world paints a different picture. With only a handful of exceptions, the dirtiest rivers in the world are located within some of the most restrictive countries. In contrast, three of the top five cleanest streams orin...

Book Review: ‘Created for Greatness: The Power of Magnanimity’ by Alexandre Havard

By the end of January, most of us have given up on our New Year’s resolutions. These are goals we enthusiastically set during the silent nights of self-reflection that Christmas affords us. We contemplate our Savior’s magnificent and humble life in contrast with our own feeble and self-seeking, sinful existence. We intensely desire personal renewal to e holier and nobler persons; yet, alas, we lack the will to actualize our true human potential. Many blame the failure mit on laziness...

Audio: Jordan Ballor on the Morality of Using Natural Resources

Jordan Ballor Acton Institute Research Fellow and Executive Editor of the Journal of Markets & Morality Jordan J. Ballor was a guest on Austin Hill in the Morningin late January on the Faith Radio Network to discuss the morality of resource extraction and use. Should Christians support efforts to drill for more oil and the use of new techniques to draw more of these resources from the Earth, or should they push for a new approach to energy creation and...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Aug 2, 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...

Aug 2, 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...

Aug 2, 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...

Aug 2, 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...

Aug 2, 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....

Aug 2, 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...

Aug 2, 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,...

Aug 2, 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...

Aug 2, 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...

Aug 2, 2026