Religion | Religious News - www.mreligion.com

Will free exercise of religion survive as a legal concept?

Is the ultimate repository of authority and control human or divine? While that is a religious question, how we answer has profound ramifications on policy and law. In fact, as Marc Degirolami notes, the answer may determine whether free exercise of religion can survive as a legal concept: One of the ways that modernity has answered this challenge is by appropriating “religion” and transforming it from a duty that one owes a creator to a duty that one owes to...

Rhode Island makes it difficult to suspend students

The current problems with the school-to-prison pipeline often start with poor school discipline policies. Various school discipline policies and tactics have e under criticism for being overly harsh—often causing students to drop out of school. The frequent use of suspension and expulsion for minor offenses has monplace in many schools across the country. Over the summer Gina Raimondo, the Democratic governor of Rhode Island, signed a bill into law making it harder for schools to suspend students for minor infractions....

Angus Deaton schools Italians on economics

But was anyone listening? That’s my question after attending the 2015 Nobel-prize-winning economist‘s talk last night in Rome at the Vatican-sponsored Cortile dei gentili(Court of Gentiles). Like the other speakers, Deaton voiced his concerns about e inequality. Unlike the others, however, he said much of it is caused by crony capitalism, a term whose meaning seems to have been lost on the Italian interpreter and hence the audience. She described it as “a type of capitalism” and “negative capitalism” but...

Radio Free Acton: Karl Zinsmeister on Philanthropy and Education Reform

On this edition of Radio Free Acton, we speak with Karl Zinsmeister, Vice President at Philanthropy Roundtableand former chief domestic policy advisor to President George W. Bush, about efforts to improve public education es over the years, why charter schools are succeeding where past reform efforts have failed, and the role of private philanthropy in fostering that success. Karl will be kicking off our Evenings at Acton seriesthis fall on Monday, October 3rd with a lecture entitled Indispensable: How Philanthropy...

Review: Samuel Gregg’s latest ‘should be on every Christian’s reading list’

The US Review of Books recently analyzed Samuel Gregg’s latest book, For God and Profit. John E. Roper, the journalist who wrote the review, gave For God and Profit a “RECOMMENDED” rating. Beyond the rating, Roper, had some very positive remarks about Gregg’s book. He said this: The author knows he has his work cut out for him. Many Christians have been indoctrinated with a general distrust of both money and its effects on society. This often translates into the...

We hate politics and the media because they lower our status

“I have a simple hypothesis,” writes economist Tyler Cowen. “No matter what the media tells you their job is, the feature of media that actually draws viewer interest is how media stories either raise or lower particular individuals in status.” Cowen believes this explains why people “get so teed off” at the media: The status ranking of individuals implied by a particular media source is never the same as yours, and often not even close. You hold more of a...

Finance, Faith, and Human Flourishing

Samuel Gregg lecturing at Acton University. Samuel Gregg’s most recent book For God and Profit continues to receive great reviews. The most es from author and speaker John Horvat, II at The Stream. Horvat begins his review by highlighting the way Gregg reconciles the pursuit of profits with Christianity. He says this: Early in the book, Gregg establishes that profit through finance can be realized “provided that es first and that the profit is (1) understood as a means to...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Jun 9, 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...

Jun 9, 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...

Jun 9, 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....

Jun 9, 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...

Jun 9, 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...

Jun 9, 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...

Jun 9, 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...

Jun 9, 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...

Jun 9, 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,...

Jun 9, 2026