Religion | Religious News - www.mreligion.com

Daniel Hannan on the Conservative Case for Brexit

In the hubbub surrounding Brexit, many conservatives have cheered the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union, hailing it as a win for freedom, democracy, and local sovereignty. Yet forthosewho disagree, support for Brexit is painted as necessarily driven by fear, xenophobia, and protectionism.Although fear of immigrants and narrow nationalism have surelyplayed their part, such sentiments and attitudes aren’t the only driversat play, and they mustn’t be heeded if Brexitis actually going to succeed. Indeed, for conservatives in the...

What motivated ‘leave’ voters in Brexit?

In the wake of the British vote to leave the European Union, many are wondering what led the majority of voters to affirm the Brexit. In mentary Brexit: Against the Political Class, Samuel Gregg points out mon element in all of the motivations behind the “Leave” decision: a frustration with established career politicians. Gregg writes: The reasons why a majority of British voters decided that their nation was better off outside the European Union were many and not always in...

Video: Vernon Smith on Faith and the Compatibility of Science and Religion

Acton University is a unique conference, a fact noted by Nobel Economics Laureate Vernon L. Smith, who used his appearance on Wednesday, June 15 as an opportunity to “speak on a topic that my fellow economists would never have asked me to speak on”: religious faith and patibility with modern science. We’re pleased to present Smith’s lecture below. ...

Radio Free Acton: Brexit’s Aftermath with Todd Huizinga

Last week on Radio Free Acton, we sat down with Acton Institute Director of International Outreach Todd Huizinga to preview the ing Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. This week, we’re back again with Todd to review the stunning results of the referendum, the reactions to it in boththe United Kingdom and the European Union, and the prospects for EU reform and British prosperity in the near and long-term future. You can listen to the podcast via the audio player...

Investing prudently and morally

David Bahnsen explains “value investing” at Acton University. How should your views on morality affect your investment strategy? David Bahnsen, Chief Investment Officer at The Bahnsen Group, argues in an Acton University presentation titled “Value Investing” that the question is a plex one. He begins by outlining the purpose of investment consistent with its definition: to make a profit. Without growth, there is no investing. Similarly, there is no such thing as a risk free investment. Biblical investment is therefore...

Is Shifting The Justice Reform Burden Better?

The brokenness of America’s criminal justice system is not just an urban issue. Working class defendants in small towns across America are vulnerable to system that does not protect them from government negligence. For example, New York’s state legislature approved new indigent defense measures last week that finished an almost decade long battle over statewide indigent defense problems. The case began with a 2007 lawsuit by the NY Civil Liberties Union on behalf of several indigent defendants (Hurrell-Harring et al....

How Are Jobs Created?

Trump promises he’ll be “the greatest jobs president that God ever created.” And Sanders says he’d spend $18 billion to create jobs. But can the president actually create jobs? And if so, do we want the government to do so? In this brief video, economist Don Boudreaux discusses what happens when the government takes tax money from some businesses to create jobs in others. ...

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....

Sep 6, 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,...

Sep 6, 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...

Sep 6, 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...

Sep 6, 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...

Sep 6, 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...

Sep 6, 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...

Sep 6, 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...

Sep 6, 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...

Sep 6, 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...

Sep 6, 2026