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Athenians and Visigoths: Neil Postman’s graduation speech

While it could be argued that youth is wasted on the young, it is indisputable mencement addresses are wasted on young graduates. Sitting in a stuffy auditorium waiting to receive a parchment that marks the beginning of one’s student loan repayments is not the most conducive atmosphere for soaking up wisdom. Insight, which can otherwise seep through the thickest of skulls, cannot pierce mortarboard. Most colleges and universities recognize this fact and schedule the graduation speeches accordingly. Schools regularly choose...

Robbing Pietro to pay Paolo? The zero-sum game in Italy’s welfare state

Robbing Peter to pay Paul. This is an idiomatic expression about bad – or at least disappointing – economics. Curiously, it was born within the context of the Church’s supposedly poor financial administration of its properties. While there are many sources to the origin of the idiom, there is a famous story from 17th C. England when a bishop was said to have ordered funds transferred from one old church (St. Peter’s Abbey) to another in disrepair (St. Paul’s Cathedral)....

How to think like a Christian

Photo Credit: Michael Matheson Miller Here is a podcast interview I did recently with my friend Matt Leonard, host of The Art of Catholic and Next Level Catholic Academy. Matt and I talked about some of the foundational ideas of Christian thinking in contrast with the dominant secular way of seeing the world. As you can see from the title of Matt’s show, The Art of Catholic, this podcast is directed to a Catholic audience, but many of the ideas...

David Deavel on popular misconceptions about socialism

At Respect Life Radio, University of St. Thomas professor of Catholic Studies David Deavel invokes Lord Acton’s famous dictum in a two-part conversation on the differences between the trendy, popular socialism in our politics today and many actual socialist states, both historically and in the present. Says Deavel, Lord Acton’s famous line that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely is … true in every system, but it is particularly true in a system where you start from a premise...

Study: How do millennial Christians approach faith, work, and calling?

Millennials recently surpassed Baby Boomers and Generation Xers to e the largest generation in the American workforce—a development that has likely led many to recall mon stereotypes about millennials as dreamy-eyed idealists or lazy, plainers. But if we look past our various cultural prejudices, what does the evidence actually indicate? If the attitudes and priorities of Generation Y are, in fact, so strikingly distinct from their counterparts, what might it tell us about the future shape of economic order? In...

An aid to defining ‘capitalism’

I am working on a project now that has to do with the various attempts to reform, redeem, redirect, or otherwise update capitalism. And in so doing, I’m reminded of one of the most incisive, insightful, and relevant passages in all of Catholic Social Teaching. I’m of course referring to section 42 of John Paul II’sCentesimus Annus, in which he distinguishes between two definitions of capitalism. This distinction is outlined in response to the following questions: “can it perhaps be...

Great news: Even ‘socialists’ love the free market (poll)

A Gallup poll released Monday made headlines: “Four in 10 Americans Embrace Some Form of Socialism.” However, the headline could have read, “Seven in 10 Americans reject the central premise of socialism.” When Gallup asked if “some form of socialism” would be “a good thing or a bad thing,” 41 percent said it would and 52 percent said it would not. However, the public’s response to an ill-defined “socialism” reveals less than a more detailed question buried deeper in the...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Oct 16, 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...

Oct 16, 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...

Oct 16, 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...

Oct 16, 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...

Oct 16, 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...

Oct 16, 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,...

Oct 16, 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....

Oct 16, 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...

Oct 16, 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...

Oct 16, 2026