Today, we celebrate the 96th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (ratified on August 18, 1920). Here are five facts you should know about women’s suffrage and the 19th Amendment: 1. The 19th Amendment doesn’t directly mention women. The text states: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article...

Since the era of Adam Smith economists have been asking, “What creates wealth?” One key answer is specialization and trade. On a timeline of human history, the recent rise in standards of living resembles a hockey stick — flatlining for all of human history and then skyrocketing in just the last few centuries. As economist Don Boudreaux explains, without specialization and trade, our ancient ancestors only consumed what they could make themselves. How can specialization and trade help explain the...

Frank Borman, then-chairman of the Eastern Airlines, said that “capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell.” That’s one way to take Peter Heslam’s reflection on the closing of BHS in the UK, “Business with a Human Face.” I would add that the purportedly impersonal nature of market exchange is also what attracts many of its supporters. Drones and automated checkout lines are increasingly allowing us not to see any faces at all. And as Martin Luther would surely have...

“We see immediately that grace is inseparably connected with nature, that grace and nature belong together.” –Abraham Kuyper In their new book, One Nation Under God: A Christian Hope for American Politics, Bruce Ashford and Chris Pappalardo offer a robustvision ofChristian political engagement, one that neither retreats from the world nor modates to its ideological whims. While many have sought to construct such a vision by trying toalign “Christian values” with particular political programs, Ashford and Pappalardo begin by focusing...

“The appeal of Bernie Sanders’ socialism is a puzzle to many, but it shouldn’t be, not if we understand how most people think about economics,” says Rev. Johannes Jacobse in this week’s Acton Commentary. Economics rightly understood then touches on deeper, transcendental truths. And, as the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn taught, any discussion about materialism and transcendence must answer the fundamental question about whether the final touchstone of truth lies inside or outside the human person. The answer determines...

How did the economy begin? ErikaGrace Davies and Antony Davies posit one theory, “At some point in our distant past, a human who had food met another who had a spear. The two exchanged, and departed better off than when they met.” I prefer a different version of this story — one that starts with Genesis 4:2b — but the e is the same: the economy started when mankind discovered specialization and trade. ...

Writing two decades ago, Gertrude Himmelfarb observed: In Britain, as in America, more and more conservatives are returning to an older Burkean tradition, which appreciates the material advantages of a free-market economy (Edmund Burke himself was a disciple of Adam Smith), but also recognizes that such an economy does not automatically produce the moral social goods that they value—that it may even subvert those goods. –Gertrude Himmelfarb, The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (New York: Alfred...

The State Department recently released its International Religious Freedom Report for 2015. A wide range of U.S. government agencies and offices use the reports for such efforts as shaping policy and conducting diplomacy. The Secretary of State also uses the reports to help determine which countries have engaged in or tolerated “particularly severe violations” of religious freedom in order to designate “countries of particular concern.” A major concern addressed in this year’s report is the threat to religious freedom posed...

The American Enterprise Institute and the Los Angeles Times have joined together to release a new survey of attitudes toward the poor, poverty, and welfare in the United States. Here are seven figures from the report you should know about: 1. The poor are more than twice as likely as those not in poverty (24 percent to 10 percent) to say the church has the greatest responsibility for helping the poor. The poor are also slightly less likely (31 percent...

Ask most Americans what they know about Jonathan Edwards and they are most likely to mention reading “”Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in high school. Being known for preaching the most famous sermon in U.S. history is no small plishment. But Edwards was one of our country’s foremost intellectuals and (arguably) our greatest Protestant theologian. He was also, as Greg Forster notes in an article for TGC, a champion of economic justice. As Forster says, Edwards believed...