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Acton Institute named a top think tank in the world in new report

Acton Institute and Instituto Acton have taken top spots in a new ranking. Earlier today, the University of Pennsylvania’sThink Tank & Civil Societies Program released the 2015 Global Go-To Think Tanks Report which maintains data on almost 7,000 organizations worldwide and creates a detailed report ranking them in various categories. Acton was named in five categories and Instituto Acton was named in one. See the highlights: Acton Institute is 9th (out of 90) in the Top Social Policy Think Tanks...

Heaven’s Not Just for Progressives

Any number of meanings are attached to “the Kingdom of God” as an essential element of Jesus’ teaching for Christian praxis. Used as just another slogan for political activism, in which the shade of meaning is usually reconstructing Heaven on Earth along collectivist lines, has me tossing the theological yellow flag. Another way to put this futile and often dangerous exercise is immanentizing the eschaton. This business has raised many skeptics. From St. Thomas More we received the word “utopia,”...

7 Figures: Faith and the 2016 Campaign

A new Pew Research Center survey examines how voters feel about the religiosity of presidential candidates. Here are seven figures you should know from the report: 1. More than half of Americans (51 percent) say they would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who does not believe in God. (This is down from 63 percent in 2007.) 2. About half of U.S. adults say it’s “very important” (27 percent) or “somewhat important” (24 percent) for a president...

Where Do Good and Evil Come From?

Where do good and e from? Some possibilities that have been proposed include evolution, reason, conscience, human nature, and utilitarianism. But as Boston College philosopher Peter Kreeft explains in the video below, none of these can be a source of objective morality. So where does e from? “The very existence of morality proves the existence of something beyond nature and beyond man,” says Kreeft. “Just as a design suggests a designer, mands suggest a mander. Moral Laws e from a...

A decade of decline for global freedom

A new report shows that global indicators of economic and political freedom declined overall in 2015, with the most serious setbacks in the area of freedom of speech and rule of law. Freedom House, an “independent watchdog organization dedicated to the expansion of freedom and democracy around the world,” released its Freedom in the World 2016 Report which included some disturbing statistics and worldwide trends, particulary as it concerns the progress made by women in some regions. The beginning of...

Federal Government Handed Immigrant Children Over to Human Traffickers

Enticed by the promise that their children could go to school in America, numerous Guatemalan parents paid to have their children smuggled into the U.S. No one knows how many made it across the border, but some of the children were detained by immigration official and transferred to the custody of Health and Human Services (HHS). Once in the hands of the federal government, the children should have been safe. Instead, the HHS gave at least adozen children over to...

5 Facts About the Iowa Caucus

Tonightthe nominating process for the U.S. presidential elections officially begins when voters in Iowa meet for the caucuses. Here are five factsyou should know about what has, since 1972, been the first electoral event of each election season: 1. A caucus is a meeting of supporters or members of a specific political party or movement. To participate in the Iowa Caucus, political supporters show up at a one of the 1,681 precincts (church, school munity center, etc.) at a specific...

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...

Apr 29, 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 29, 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 29, 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 29, 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 29, 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 29, 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....

Apr 29, 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 29, 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 29, 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 29, 2026