Do you know the name of the author and publisher of the Book of Ephesians? Do all Mormons practice polygamy? What about the two major branches of Islam? Apparently, many journalists don’t know the answers to these questions either. (That first one was a real question asked by a journalist to Michael Cromartie, of the D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center.) Given how much religion informs the lives of most people on the planet, and our news, it is a...

My older son’s college psychology class was recently assigned the film A Beautiful Mind, about the Nobel Prize winning economist and schizophrenia sufferer John Nash. The assignment was to watch the film, dig into Nash’s biography, and report on how the film altered Nash’s story of mental breakdown and recovery. We watched the film together as a family (my second viewing), checked out the biography by Sylvia Nasar from a local library, and generally geeked out on Nash and game...

New York Times columnist and Acton University 2014 plenary speaker Ross Douthat is featured in an interview with the Institute for Family Studies. Douthat addresses issues surrounding marriage and family life, pop culture influences and the media. Douthat says that he had thought that the idea of a mom and dad, living with their biological kids, was a “given” in our culture as the best model for a healthy society. Now, he says, our world has thrown a lot of...

The Bible has a lot to say about the principles behind bankruptcy law, says T. Kyle Bryant. In the Old Testament, God gave Moses various laws concerning the poor, lenders, borrowers, and debt forgiveness. From these passages, we get a glimpse of how God makes provision for people who cannot pay their debt after a certain number of years. Beside discouraging lenders from making “bad” loans (ones that could not be repaid in seven years), the law prevented overwhelming debt...

. The premise Ms. Bazelon puts forth is that the growing movement to make sex-selective abortions illegal in the U.S. is based on racial biases towards Asians, e from cultures where sex-selective abortions are mon. Bazelon states, The International Human Rights Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School and the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum are publishing a new study that exposes banning abortion based on sex-selection for what it is: a way to restrict abortion, not bat...

It has long been apparent that U.S. borders are far from secure. Border patrol agents are stretched thin, especially along the southern states, dealing with illegal immigrants, human traffickers and smugglers, and the drug cartels. Now, there is a new problem with no easy solution: children teeming into the U.S., many under the age of 12. According to The Washington Times, The flood of young children pouring across the southwestern border is worse than the administration has previously acknowledged, and...

The longer that Americans are unemployed, the more likely they are to report signs of poor psychological well-being. A recent Gallup survey found that about one in five Americans who have been unemployed for a year or more say they currently have or are being treated for depression. Gallup finds that unemployed Americans are more than twice as likely to say they currently have or are being treated for depression than both those with full-time jobs and those who have...

Jonathan Witt, research fellow at Acton, recently wrote a piece at The Federalist about “social business.” He argues that it might do more good to own and operate an ethical business that follows through on its contracts and “respects the dignity of employees and customers,” rather than trying to have a “social business.” Witt begins by talking about a cardboard bike. In 2012, Izhar Gafni became relatively famous by creating a sturdy cardboard bike that could be sold to the...

Freedom to practice one’s faith and be a person of faith can be instrumental in enabling the poor to achieve some modicum of social and economic freedom, says Rebecca Shah: Religion is no panacea, but aspects of religion can activate certain practices and partnerships among its adherents that can motivate and encourage economic development. If modern economics continues to yield an understanding of human development that ignores the role of religion, governments and development institutions will persist in acting as...

Evan Koons just posted the first video blog, or “vlog,” in support of For the Life of the World: Letters to the Exiles, a new educational video series from the Acton Institute. The series, which follows Koons on a creative journey to discover “God’s Economy of All Things,” begins by laying the framework that Koons alludes to here. As he wrote in a recent article for Q Ideas: We are being called by God to spend the remainder of our...