Last weekFrench President Emmanuel Macron came to the United States for a two-day summit with President Trump and an address before Congress. As Acton senior editor Rev. Ben Johnson notes at The American Spectator, Macron’s speech before Congress reveals a deep fissure within the West about its most fundamental values—a fracture es as the West faces powerful challenges from outside its borders: Macron’s speech to Congress represents one set of values: the statist orientation of the bureaucratic EU elite. Leaving...

Warning: This article contains a major spoiler about the plot of‘Avengers: Infinity War.’ If you haven’t seen the movie yetand don’t want it to know what happens then PLEASE STOP READING NOW. Since I was a boy I’ve loved Marvel Comics, and over the past decade I’ve loved almost everything about the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). But I don’t love the latest the edition of the MCU,Avengers: Infinity War. I should love the film because it’s packed with everything I...

Readers in Italy, the UK and the US are probably already familiar with the case ofAlfie Evans, the 23-month-old baby boy suffering from an undiagnosed degenerative neurological condition. I’m writing on April 30, two days after Alfie died and one week after he was taken off life support at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool, where he had been a patient since December 2016. The case made international headlines because it pitted Alfie’s young parents, who wanted to continue treatment,...

John Elliott and his friends at Diogenes Games created Socialism: The Game as a free-market lampoon of the board game Monopoly. The rules of the interminable Parker Brothers/Hasbro favorite teach children a distorted version of the free market (and its length gives adults a foretaste of Purgatory). Diogenes’ “unofficial expansion set” turns the game on its head: its object is for all players to attain equal poverty. In this thoughtful reimagining, the banker is replaced by the Federal Directorate of...

On this episode of Radio Free Acton, we feature the second installment of RFA Reports. Guest Anne Marie Schieber-Dykstra, an award-winning reporter and former anchor with WOODTV Grand Rapids, talks with experts and patients on ways in which Direct Primary Care centers are providing better medical care for affordable prices. Then, on the Upstream segment, Bruce Edward Walker talks about the latest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: “Avengers: Infinity War” with Micah Watson, professor of political science at Calvin...

Note: This is post #76 in a weekly video series on basic economics. Because of differences in national growth rates there can be large disparities in economic wealth among different countries. A poor country can not only grow, but it can do so quickly. It can catch up with developed countries at an astonishing rate. That’s the good news, says Alex Tabarrok in this video by Marginal Revolution University. The bad news is, while growth can skyrocket in some countries,...

Throughout my conservative evangelical upbringing, I was routinely encouraged to follow the call of the “five-fold ministry,” whether from the pulpit in weekly church services or the prayer altars of summer youth camps. The implications were clear: entering so-called “vocational ministry” was a higher calling than, well, everything else. Later, in my college years at a leftist Christian university, I witnessed a lopsidedness of a different sort. Instead of being prodded into global missions, I was now encouraged to “make...

Series Note: Jobs are one of the most important aspects of a morally functioning economy. They help us serve the needs of our neighbors and lead to human flourishing both for the individual and munities. Conversely, not having a job can adversely affect spiritual and psychological well-being of individuals and families. Because unemployment is a spiritual problem, Christians in America need to understand and be aware of the monthly data on employment. Each month highlight the latest numbers we need...

Rev. Dr. James Hal Cone died last week at the age of 79. Cone was a professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary and the father of black liberation theology. In a 2008 Acton Commentary, Anthony Bradley provided a brief explanation of Cone’s system of black liberation theology and its roots in Marxism: Black liberation theologians James Cone and Cornel West have worked diligently to embed Marxist thought into the black church since the 1970s. For Cone, Marxism best...

This Saturday is the 200thanniversary of the birth of Karl Marx, the most destructively influential writer on economics in world history. Here are five facts should know about the German philosopher and co-author of The Communist Manifesto: 1. As a student at the University of Bonn, Marx was introduced to the philosophy of the late Berlin professor G.W.F. Hegel and joined the Young Hegelians, a group that held radical views on religion and society. At the time Marx was still...