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Science: Human beings were made for creative cooperation

Popular culture presents the human race petitors in a selfish struggle for the survival of the fittest. However, new scientific research finds that the human race has a natural tendency to cooperate—and that religion increases philanthropic giving and voluntarism during a crisis. “Humans are quite possibly the world’s best cooperators,” according to a summary by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, which sponsors research into the topic. “Cooperation has never been more relevant” than during the global pandemic of COVID-19. Scientists...

Alejandro Chafuen in Forbes: Latin America’s coronavirus situation

Last month Alejandro Chafuen, Acton’s Managing Director, International, published a piece on detailing Latin America’s response to and preparedness for COVID-19. He recently followed up with a new post that brings his analysis up to date and highlights the situation’s relationship to the rest of the Americas. The leaders of Brazil and Mexico remain targets of criticism, and it remains to be seen what effect, if any, changing seasons will have on the virus’s spread. The coronavirus has so far...

Rethinking free markets in an age of anxiety

On December 26, 1991, the USSR’s Supreme Soviet passed its final piece of legislation. Declaration Number 142-Н formally stated that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist as a sovereign entity. That vote sealed America’s victory in the Cold War. Many also believed that the twentieth century’s primary economic contest—socialism versus capitalism—was over. Across the world, even nations with long histories of dirigisme seemed to be embracing markets. All that seems like a long time ago. Today market skepticism is...

J.D. Vance and the politics of resentment

Resentment is plicated emotion, a curious mix of disappointment, disgust, anger, and fear. The villainous poser Antonio Salieri in Miloš Forman’s Academy Award-winning film Amadeus is a study in resentment. In his youth, Salieri, desired nothing more than to make music. Salieri admits Mozart was his idol and that “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know his name!” He confesses he was always jealous of Mozart’s talent but still makes a successful career as poser in Vienna. When...

A free-market agenda for rebuilding from the coronavirus

On June 18, 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill steeled his people for the Battle of Britain with a stirring speech in the House of Commons that concluded: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’” The present coronavirus crisis calls for Churchillian statesmanship, yet few, if any, democratically elected leaders have proven equal...

Acton Line podcast: Responding to a Harvard prof’s call to ban homeschooling

Homeschooling is growing in popularity. In fact, the U.S. Department of Education has shown that it’s grown at a rate of over 60% in the last decade, as many families are deciding that educating their children at home is better than sending them to public or private schools. But Harvard University has a different opinion. In Harvard Magazine’s May/June 2020 issue, one Harvard Law School professor calls for a ban on homeschooling, saying it may keep children from “contributing positively...

Build yourself, build society

One of Christ’s best-known parables is the Parable of the Talents, but its familiarity disguises just how strange and unsettling its message is. It is a parable of a master who departs on a journey and entrusts three servants, each according to his ability, with his property. Each receives five, two, or one talent(s), respectively. The ablest servant departed, immediately put the money to work, and doubled his master’s talents. The servant entrusted with two talents did the same. But...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Nov 2, 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...

Nov 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...

Nov 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...

Nov 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...

Nov 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....

Nov 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,...

Nov 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...

Nov 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...

Nov 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...

Nov 2, 2026