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Is the Tide Turning on Religious Belief?

Despite the dour statistics about declining church attendance, religious faith seems to be experiencing a revival. What role did the New Atheists ironically play in it? And what is its future? Read More… In the latter half of the 19th century, the poet Matthew Arnold, on his honeymoon, was walking with his bride along the rocky shoreline of the English Channel as the tide was going out. The sound made him think of “the Sea of Faith,” which was once...

Baseball at the Abyss

The recent controversy over the anti-Catholic group hosted by the L.A. Dodgers recalls scandals of baseball’s past. Yet the all-American game always manages to bounce back. You can thank great performances on the field—just don’t forget the fans. Read More… On June 16, some 2,000 people gathered outside Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium to protest the team’s having chosen to honor, on the field before that night’s game, a group whose core mission and purpose is the open mockery and parody...

On Constitution Day, Celebrate the Anti-Federalists

Attacks on the Constitution are popular these days, but a look at the original debates pro and con should reassure us as to what a gift it was and remains to the Republic. Read More… Constitutional questions used to be intellectually serious, steeped peting traditions, and shaped by schools of thought often rooted in divergent interpretations of the American past. No more. Now we get pressing questions like, “Can Trump run for president from prison?,” Congressmen asserting that “the Electoral...

Why Philosophy? Reflections on Fides et Ratio.

It never has to be faith versus reason. Centuries of Christian philosophical and scientific inquiry attest to this. Read More… “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth.” Twenty-five years ago today, Pope John Paul II (JPII) opened his 13th papal encyclical, Fides et Ratio, with these profound, beautiful, and now familiar words. The missive launches...

Elisabeth Elliot and the Mystery of Divine Providence

Bestselling author Ellen Vaughn (The Jesus Revolution) has just brought out the second volume of an authorized biography of Elisabeth Elliot, who was, and remains, an inspiration to evangelical Christians around the world. Read More… With over 24 books to her credit, renowned biographer and New York Times bestselling author Ellen Vaughn is out with her second volume on the life and work of Elisabeth Elliot, the noted Christian author, speaker, and philosopher who died in 2015 after a 10-year...

Student Loans and the Sin of Usury

President Biden’s attempts to erase large portions of student loan debt miss the larger moral picture. Read More… A new school year has just begun, and students and their parents are faced once again with the high cost of higher education. The Supreme Court ruled President Biden’s executive order on student loan forgiveness unconstitutional. Undeterred, the president has since expanded e-based repayment. Predictably, Democrats defended it and Republicans attacked it. Meanwhile, many continue to struggle with student debt. Tuition has...

The Basic Principles of Wealth Creation Have Not Changed

No matter how scary the economy may look today, you have more control over your economic future than you think. Get back to basics: both principle and habits. Read More… The need for economic education has never been more apparent. In an inflationary economy with housing costs outpacing first-time homebuyer budgets, banking collapses, and a popping tech bubble, the need for sound economics is self-evident. St. Thomas Aquinas defined self-evident as that which the intellect clearly apprehends; today, it is...

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....

May 31, 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,...

May 31, 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...

May 31, 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...

May 31, 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...

May 31, 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...

May 31, 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...

May 31, 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...

May 31, 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...

May 31, 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...

May 31, 2026