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Danish elections are usually not high on the list of must-watch political contests but the ing election on June 5 is one that I think worth watching. As this Guardian article illustrates, it is distinguished by the fact that the Danish Social Democrats—the main center-left party in Denmark—have revisited and substantially changed their approach to immigration. Under the leadership of Mette Frederiksen, the Danish Social Democrats have broken with the reigning consensus on the European left, essentially adopting many of...

HBO’s ‘Chernobyl‘: A scathing rebuke of Soviet secrecy

In case you missed it, the final episode of the highly acclaimed five-part HBO miniseries “Chernobyl” aired last night. When the credits rolled, I let out a pent-up breath that I didn’t know that I was holding in and slumped back in my seat, finally able to relax. The show was over, but the weightiness of its message and atmosphere lingered on, sticking with me even as I laid down to sleep. “Chernobyl” dramatizes the events leading up to and...

Capitalism and the opportunity for a more united conservative front

Last week the Heritage Foundation hosted an event featuring Samuel Gregg, the Acton Institute’s director of research, in which he highlighted the importance of providing not only an economic justification for capitalism but also a moral justification. At Juicy Ecumenism, Mia Steupert considers Gregg’s talk in light of the recent debate among conservatives: Gregg discussed this topic in the framework ofAlexis De TocquevilleandMichael mentary on the moral justifications of capitalism. Gregg mainly focused on outlining Novak’s views on the connection...

How ‘conservatives’ became the war party

The only thing that can e the stupidity of modern-day progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the 24 people contending for the 2020 presidential nomination of the Democratic Party is an understanding of the price—and the consequences — of the policies that they preach. Progressive policy is expensive, very expensive, and a wise person should be extremely reluctant to spend other people’s money on utopian schemes like the Green New Deal. But people are not wise, and that is why America...

Providence magazine reviews Kuyper’s ‘On Islam’

Last year, in collaboration with the Abraham Kuyper Translation Society, the Acton Institute and Lexham Press teamed together to publish On Islam. The latest in the 12-volume series Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology details Kuyper’s observations while traveling in the Mediterranean. At Providence magazine, Tim Scheiderer reviews On Islam and considers Kuyper’s Christian advice for foreign policy: In the bookOn Islam, the Acton Institute has translated into English for the first time portions from Abraham Kuyper’s larger work,Om...

Stewardship as the Christian’s cultural mandate

“Economic issues entail first and foremost a stewarding of resources,” says J. Daryl Charles in this week’s Acton Commentary. “To properly understand this task, we must begin with the doctrines of creation and providence.” Our mandate, based on creation (which has not been overturned or altered), is that we co-create (with God, based on the imago Dei, his likeness); that we develop, shape, and extend what God has called into being. Therein we utilize the endless and varied resources that...

The Ahmari/French debate: A reading list

“If you printed out and stacked up every piece written about the dispute between First Things contributor Sohrab Ahmari and National Review writer David French, it wouldn’t quite go up 68,000 miles—that would be the $22 trillion national debt, stacked by ones—but it would be towering nonetheless,” says Matt Welch. For those who are late to the debate and want to catch up, I’ve collected a reading list of articles related to the controversy. I’ve included the original essay by...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Sep 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...

Sep 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...

Sep 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...

Sep 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....

Sep 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,...

Sep 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...

Sep 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...

Sep 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...

Sep 16, 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...

Sep 16, 2026