Taking a cue from No Straw Men, I’m updating the look and feel of the Acton PowerBlog. Jonathan Rick suggests pletely separating your blog from your organization’s main Web site is a bad idea because you cut off access to useful information and create two distinct audiences rather than integrating traffic between two distinct sections of one Web site. Acton’s blog has always been on the same domain as the main Acton site (www.acton.org) but we’ve recently given the blog...

This article at the WSJ reviews a book that purports to be about progressive environmentalism. Doomsday is out. Nobody cares. People need material well-being before they are interested in environmentalism at all. Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger want "an explicitly pro-growth agenda," on the theory that investment, innovation and imagination may ultimately do more to improve the environment than punitive regulation and finger-wagging rhetoric. To stabilize atmospheric carbon levels will take more–much more–than regulation; it will require "unleashing human power, creating...

Rev. Robert Sirico, president of the Acton Institute, has an article in today’s Detroit News on the recent conviction of Rev. Christian von Wernich, a Catholic priest sentenced to life in prison for his role in supporting the totalitarian regime during Argentina’s National Reorganization Process. Rev. von Wernich, a police chaplain, was accused of sharing the conversations he received with prisoners in the confessional with the police who then used them as evidence against those prisoners and in making further...

Joel Kotkin explains that the fastest growing cities are not the ones that cater to singles, but those that cater to families. Read it all here. Cross-posted at my blog. ...

The nomination process has begun for the international 2008 Novak Award. Named after theologian Michael Novak, this $10,000 award rewards new outstanding research into the relationship between religion and economic liberty. Over the past seven years, this award has been given to young, promising scholars throughout the world. To nominate an emerging scholar, plete the online form. We encourage professors, university faculty, and other scholars to nominate those who pleting exceptional research into themes relevant to the mission and vision...

The Cato Institute and Randal O’Toole offer an appealing new book, The Best Laid Plans—a recounting of the failures of government planning. Think of it as extensive documentation of the truth Hayek observed half a century ago: it is impossible for a central authority to collect all the information or make all the predictions necessary to foresee how economic activity will play out. Therefore, it is impossible to plan centrally the operation of major sectors of the economy such as...

Thanks to Rob Chaney at the Missoulian, the touching story of young Caden Stufflebeam is told. Chaney wrote a piece titled, “Rocks to riches: Missoula boy sells stones he finds to buy food for needy.” Appropriately noted as the top story for the paper in Missoula, Mont., Caden has been collecting and selling rocks and donating the proceeds to the less fortunate. The young boy is filled with an abundance of generosity and spiritual knowledge. Christ declared in Matthew, “I...

An assortment of radical socialist chums gathered in Caracas, Venezuela for a lively discussion on the issue, “United States: A possible revolution.” The event was part of the third annual Venezuela International Book Fair on November 9-18, and featured the usual campus radicals, anti-American crusaders, and Marxist activists. As usual mitted Marxists, the main target of evil and oppression in the world is the United States. Writing a summary of events for the Militant, Olympia Newton’s article is titled, “Venezuela...

There’s no better time to re-examine the legacy of the Puritans than on the Thanksgiving holiday, which is so closely associated with the Pilgrim’s exodus to America in 1621. With that in mind, here are a few resources for understanding the worldview that Max Weber called a “worldly asceticism.” “Eat, Drink, and Relax: Think the Pilgrims would frown on today’s football-tossing, turkey-gobbling Thanksgiving festivities? Maybe not.” Christian History & Biography.“History and Theology of the Puritans.” The Shepherd’s Scrapbook (links to...

Does a good education demand an appreciation for history? It would seem so. What arguments are there to support such a contention? Neil Postman writes, There is no escaping ourselves. The human dilemma is as it always has been, and it is a delusion to believe that the future will render irrelevant what we know and have long known about ourselves but find it convenient to forget. In quoting this passage from Postman’s Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century,...