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Aaron Judge, the Asterisk, and the Record Books

As the Yankee outfielder enters the record books, it’s time to reflect on how we judge the best in baseball. Read More… So Aaron Judge sits atop the American League record books for most home runs hit in a single season—62, breaking fellow Yankee Roger Maris’ 60-plus-year record. And by all accounts, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Michael Conforto, a former outfielder for the New York Mets, had this to say about Judge: “He’s huge but he’s one...

For Britain’s PM, Chaos Has Consequences

After a mere 45 days, Liz Truss is out as prime minister. Given the contradictions in Conservative Party policies, no one should be surprised. Read More… Boris Johnson, though deeply flawed, was the glue that held the British Conservative Party together. His electoral reach, charisma, mitment to deliver Brexit put together a huge majority of 80 seats over all other bined in the 650-seat House of Commons. But that glue came unstuck owing to Boris’ character flaws, and now, in...

The Next American Economy Is Cause for Hope

The latest from Samuel Gregg lays out a broad vision for what made the American economy the wonder of the world, and can again. And it isn’t to be found in populisms and nationalisms of the right or left. Read More… Let me start with my summary judgement of The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World: Samuel Gregg has written an outstanding contribution to the theory and practice of political economy for our times. Gregg’s...

Andor Succeeds Where Other Star Warriors Fail

The latest installation in the Star Wars saga is finally a reason to celebrate, as it models self-sacrifice and leadership, especially for young men. Read More… If there’s anything close to national mythology in America nowadays, it’s Marvel. This may be depressing, but we should nevertheless face the fact and make the best of it. Before that, it was Star Wars, which is still an incredibly profitable business, even as it is failing. They’re both Disney properties, which now make...

Unlocking the Mystery of Your Wildest Problems

Trying to anticipate all the ways life-transforming decisions can go wrong is stress we’ve all experienced. A new book by economist and podcaster Russ Roberts helps us look at those forks in the road with better eyes. Read More… The most thought-provoking scene in John Boorman’s 1981 lavish epic fantasy film, Excalibur, is one of its most understated. It’s a conversation about love. King Arthur stares enchanted by the Lady Guinevere as she dances across the great hall. After confessing...

Religious Liberty and the American Founding

A new book sheds much-needed light on what the Founders did—and did not—say about religious liberty, church-state relations, and natural rights. Read More… The religion clauses in the First Amendment are among the most hotly debated topics in constitutional law and history. Unfortunately, the records of the Founders don’t always offer much help in elucidating their meaning. The congressional debates over the religion clauses can be especially exasperating to scholars. The framers in the First Congress lurched from one draft...

Blonde at Its Best Highlights What’s Worst

This overlong film’s best moments are the simple and the universally understandable. Too bad they were few and far between. Read More… Director Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, now available on Netflix and starring Ana de Armas as “blonde bombshell” Marilyn Monroe, is a long film. Not merely because of its almost three-hour run time but also because it feels long when you’re watching it. The latest attempt to explore plex life of stardom, abuse, and mental illness attempts to do a...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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 11, 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 11, 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...

Apr 11, 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 11, 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 11, 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 11, 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 11, 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 11, 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 11, 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 11, 2026