There’s an old saying that corruption is authority plus monopoly minus transparency. bination makes state-level governments especially prone to the temptations of corruption. A new study in Public Administration Review, “The Impact of Public Officials’ Corruption on the Size and Allocation of U.S. State Spending,” looks at the impact of government corruption on states’ expenditures. Defining corruption as the “misuse of public office for private gain,” the authors of the paper note that public and private corruption can have a...

Christians colleges aren’t usually known for being on the cutting-edge of technology. But The King’s College, an evangelical college located in New York City, is leading the way by ing the first accredited college in the United States to accept Bitcoin for tuition and other expenses: “The King’s College seeks to transform society by preparing students for careers in which they help to shape and eventually to lead strategic public and private institutions. Allowing Bitcoin to be used to pay...

It’s no secret that family dysfunction leads to many societal problems. Whether it’s addiction, abuse, financial issues, lack of educational support or simply distrustful or demeaning conditions, unhealthy family issues take their toll. One of the roots of human trafficking is unhealthy family situations. The Urban Institute, through funding from the U.S. Department of Justice, pleted prehensive study of human trafficking in seven U.S. cities. A law enforcement official from Washington, D.C. (one of the cities in the study) discusses...

The West has made some remarkable steps forward culturally in the past several generations, as, for instance, in the areas of civil rights (the unborn being a notable exception), race relations, and cooperation among Christians of different traditions. We shouldn’t indulge a false nostalgia that overlooks this progress. That being said, you can visit almost any major city in the free world today and find evidence of cultural decay on a host of fronts: malls dripping with images of sensuality...

This morning, Acton Institute President Rev. Robert A. Sirico took some time away from his preparations for Acton Universityto speak with Jim Engster, host of The Jim Engster Showon WRKF radio in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, discussing how to address the issue of poverty in society, and the approach taken by Pope Francis and the church in general to that and other issues. They also discussed the problems with the ObamaCare model of health-care reform, among other issues. You can listen...

Rev. Robert Sirico was recently on WSJ Live, talking to Simon Constable about Pope Francis and his shakeup of Vatican finances: ...

“We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar Last night, I...

The most recent issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality, vol. 17, no. 1, has been published online at our website (here). This issue features an array of scholarship on the foundations and fabric of free and virtuous societies, ranging from David VanDrunen’s examination of the market economy and Christian ethics, offering an unique synthesis between pro- and anticapitalist perspectives, to David Urban’s examination of liberty and virtuous self-government in the works of the seventeenth-century English poet John Milton....

There is an informative podcast on a new book titled The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom over at the Library of Law and Liberty. The author, Steven D. Smith, is the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, University of San Diego and Co-Executive Director of the USD Institute for Law and Religion. Smith challenges the popular notion that American religious freedom was merely an enlightenment revolt from European Christendom and was meant to uplift a secular interpretation of the...

[Part 1 of 12 here] In the 1950s and ‘60s, blacks were winning the civil rights they should have had all along, but in the midst of this positive trend, increasingly aggressive minimum wage regulations and extensive welfare programs were beginning to displace paratively free market of labor and private charity. munities flooded with this state-sponsored mode of redistributive justice now face far higher levels injustice in the form of unpunished crimes munity breakdown than before the redistributive justice arrived....