The birth of a new genre: econo-psychobilly bouzouki music. Opa, you all! For more great Merle Hazard tunes, check out his website. They don’t call him “The Man in Beige” for nothing. PBS NewsHour has more on the Nashville crooner. (HT: Calculated Risk) ...

In the background of this month’s 11th General Assembly of the Lutheran World Federation, it’s important to recall the recent history of global Lutheranism. The basic context is that Lutheranism has been self-understood as historically associated with social quietism, particularly as expressed in the church’s impotency in the face of the Nazi menace. One approach in answer to this has been to e correspondingly active in social causes. This is, at least in part, we see such an emphasis on...

This week’s Acton Commentary from Rev. Gregory Jensen, “Finding the Balance: Privacy and the Civil Society,” is a thoughtful reflection on the place of privacy in our modern life. I have recently made the claim that public persons, such as police officers and politicians, have a somewhat different claim to privacy than private persons. This was especially in the context of controversy over the legality of videorecording police officers while on the job. Gizmodo follows up on a previous item...

In a recent post Dr. Sam Gregg outlined several arguments in the casefor returning to some kind of gold modity-based monetary system. One of the advantages to modity standard, Dr. Gregg argues, is that it “placed a high premium on economic security by reducing the uncertainty and risk that flows from fluctuations in the value of money that have nothing to do with the relative valuation of different goods and services.” One of the main determinants of trust in a...

Thomas Jefferson’s long-forgotten theory of state nullification may have found an ideal time for a resurgence, as the Tea Party and other groups advocate limited government as a solution to many of our current problems in health care, the economic crisis, our broken educational system, and the relentless expansion of government. The concept of nullification is simple, yet powerful: That individual states can and should refuse to enforce unconstitutional federal laws; and that the states, not the federal government, should...

Courtesy Evangelical Outpost and the always-interesting 33 Things, here’s a video on the strangeness of the economics of incentives and punishments: The lesson here is that people in real life, body and soul, are not simple rational economic actors who respond only to material realities. We exist in the context of social webs and relationships. But we also have non-material faculties; consciences, free choice, creativity, speculative reason. Homo economicus is useful as a partial model of human behavior, but it...

His Eminence George Cardinal Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, who delivered the keynote address at Acton’s 2004 annual dinner (full text here), has recently produced two mentaries: the first on global warming, the second on the Christian foundations of modern Western Civilization. First, the Cardinal responds to critics of his view that the frenzy over the magnitude of man-made climate change is overblown: Vanishing Challenge By + Cardinal George Pell Archbishop of Sydney 18 July 2010 Humanly induced climate change...

As part of its First Principles series in Political Thought, the Heritage Foundation has published The Moral Basis for Economic Liberty by the Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president and co-founder of the Acton Institute. You can read the paper online or download as a PDF. Abstract: Today, those who defend free markets and capitalism often do so solely on managerial or technical grounds, but economic liberty needs a moral defense as well. Defense of economic liberty without reference to morality...

This mentary by Rev. Gregory Jensen. Sign up for Acton News & Commentary here. Finding the Balance: Privacy and the Civil Society by Rev. Gregory Jensen Privacy in our culture e to serve not a deepening of community life but an ever deeper sense of social isolation. Even otherwise laudable behavior is increasingly justified not by the goodness of what is done but by the modern sense of privacy. Even among those who ought to know better, the Gospel is...

Today marks the opening of the 11th General Assembly of the Lutheran World Federation, held this time in Stuttgart. Today is also the 66th anniversary of the failed Stauffenberg assassination attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler. There will be much more on the LWF assembly and it social witness in ing days. The assembly’s theme is, “Give us today our daily bread,” and the meeting promises to focus on hunger issues. I’ll be paying special attention to the engagement...