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How creative Christians should handle ‘dangerous wealth’

In exploring the intersection of Christianity and economics, we routinely see several e into play, particularly between notions of generosity and personal profit. The key question is: How do we reconcile our calling to be both a selfless servant and a maker and multiplier? In a new talk from the Economic Wisdom Project’s latest Karam Forum, Greg Forster encourages us to find the answer in the particular paradox of the Christian life. Drawing from Mathetes’ ancient Letter to Diognetus, Forster...

Just the facts about the coronavirus

Coronavirus, or COVID-19, has invited people around the world to take a sober approach to life and social relations. But it has also spread a potentially worse contagion throughout society: panic. At the Acton Institute’sReligion & Liberty Transatlantic website, James Agresti dispenses the cold facts about COVID-19. Every article written by Agresti, the president ofJust Facts,provides verifiable, documented data without political spin. This article is no exception. At the end of the article, Agresti notes the economic dangers the virus...

Is Latin America prepared for coronavirus?

This morning Alejandro Chafuen, Acton’s managing director, international, wrote in Forbes about Latin American countries’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus there hasn’t reached the levels we see in China or Europe or even the U.S., but there are serious concerns about preparedness for future developments, especially regarding Brazil and Mexico, the region’s two largest countries in both population and economic strength. Populist leaders Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico have often seemed flippant...

Spain learned the wrong lessons from the ‘yellow vests’

With COVID-19 ushering in a new era of social distancing, the idea of a mass demonstration seems as quaint as a delivery from the milkman. However, as recently as last month the memory of France’s gilet jaunes—the yellow-vested protesters who blocked French intersections over proposed fuel taxes—inspired Spanish farmers to block streets and wring ill-conceived concessions from the government. Spanish farmers believed producers should receive the lion’s share of the final sales cost. This echoes the Marxist “labor theory of...

€153M in coronavirus philanthropy helps plug Italy’s drained public coffers

Clearly, we are facing a disheartening situation here in Italy, where I study at one of Rome’s pontifical universities. It seems that every day brings more bad news, more regulations, and more uncertainty. Public health resources and state coffers are also stretched rail thin. As Italy’s public funds have been rapidly depleting, the gap certainly needs to be filled and filled quickly. In the face of this massive financial challenge, and despite the constant demonizing of the richest 1% “who...

This Alabama church is offering COVID-19 tests

Given the dramatic disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, many are reflecting on ways to better love and serve our neighbors during times of crisis. While disciplined social distancing is the obvious first step, we also see a number of ground-up efforts to mobilize congregations and institutions to support the evolving needs of individuals munities. For example, the largest church in Birmingham, Alabama—the Church of the Highlands—has coordinated with the governor and a local laboratory to host and facilitate drive-through coronavirus...

How to turn social distancing into love

The most ubiquitous phrase popularized by the coronavirus epidemic, “social distancing,” carries connotations of shunning or anti-social behavior. The isolation of the elderly particularly tugs at our heartstrings. The widely shared photo of 88-year-old Dorothy Campbell speaking through a nursing home’s window to her 89-year-old husband, Gene, poignantly depicts the deep-seated need for human contact amid the obstructions of anti-virus protocols. But distancing in a time of global pandemics preserves life. As such, it should be seen as a form...

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...

Apr 25, 2025

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, 2025

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, 2025

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, 2025

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, 2025

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, 2025

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, 2025

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, 2025

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, 2025

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, 2025