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Islamic State’s Atrocities Against Women: It’s Getting Worse

Young girls kidnapped from their beds. Yazidi women and girls sold into sex trafficking. Rumors of female Muslim teens being used as suicide bombers. It is hard to imagine that Islamic extremists could make things more difficult for women and girls in war-stricken areas, but they are. A United Nations team of sex crime investigators has been working in and around Islamic State war zones since 2009. Middle East Eye reports: According to its head, Zainab Bangura, the Islamic State...

Vatican Conference Focuses On Women And Sustainable Development

The Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace, the World Union of Catholic Women’s Organizations and the World Women’s Alliance for Life and Family are currently meeting in Rome to discuss the role of women and global sustainable development. Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace, told Vatican News that he considered 2015 to be a crucial year for this issue. With the U.N. Millenium Development goals expiring this year, and new Sustainable Development goals to...

Why Don’t City Governments Increase Minimum Wages Now Instead of in 2020?

Many of the current debates about minimum wage revolve around whether such laws increase unemployment. Such disputes often make it appear that there is a lack of consensus on the issue when, in fact, there is broad-based agreement. For example there are two groups who clearly understand the connection between government-mandated wage floors and unemployment of low-skilled workers: right-leaning economists and left-leaning politicians. Conservative and libertarian economists are frequently vocal in their opposition to the minimum wage because they know...

Has FLOW Changed Your Perspective? Share Your Story!

Have you beeninspired and influencedby the Acton Institute’s film series, For the Life of the World: Letters to the Exiles? What have you learned? How has it changed your perspective on work, culture, and whole-life discipleship? As Evan Koons explains, we’re interested in hearing your stories: Your story may get used in a blog post or a video, and if it does, you may even get some free stuff! Send your experiences to[email protected]. ...

Wasting Away In Refugee Camps

A refugee camp, by definition, is meant to be temporary. Yet, in many places in Africa, young people know nothing but life in a refugee camp. And they are wasting away – perhaps not physically, but mentally, emotionally and in terms of feeling useful. In Tanzania, Ezad Essa explored some of these camp, talking to young people. Ilunga Malea Shabani, 26, says he does not recall his journey to Tanzania well. It was some time in 1997 when major fighting...

Why Baptists Loved Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was a Deist who famously cut and pasted, with a razor and glue, his own version of the New Testament to remove all the miracles of Jesus and any reference to his Resurrection. So why did Baptists in New England cheer when he won the presidency and claim he had won a providential victory over John Adams? As Thomas S. Kidd and Barry Hankins explain, despite their differences the Baptists were able to mon cause with Jefferson on...

Cronyism Isn’t Just About Economics; It’s About Culture

According to Merriam-Webster, “cronyism” is ” the unfair practice by a powerful person (such as a politician) of giving jobs and other favors to friends.” For instance, former Detroit mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, surrounded himself with friends and family members while in office, as he cheerfully plundered the city’s coffers, sharing the wealth with his entourage. It’s easy to think that cronyism is like Oz: “far, far away.” Yes, there are tricky creatures there, but heavens, we here in Kansas won’t...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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....

Apr 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...

Apr 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...

Apr 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...

Apr 25, 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...

Apr 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...

Apr 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,...

Apr 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...

Apr 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...

Apr 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...

Apr 25, 2026