The Acton Institute is pleased to announce that Eric Metaxas, author of the New York Times #1 bestseller, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy will be the keynote speaker for our 22nd Annual Dinner. Metaxas has written for such eclectic outlets as VeggieTales, Chuck Colson, and the New York Times. He is a best-selling author whose biographies, children’s books, and works of popular apologetics have been translated into German, Albanian, Portuguese, Spanish, Korean, Turkish, Galician, French, Complex Chinese, Dutch, Danish, Italian,...

Cardinal Timothy Dolan recently gave a speech in which he provided a helpful summary of Catholic Social Justice in seven “givens” and seven “oughts.” The seven “givens” are: 1. The sacredness of human life. 2. The infinite dignity of the human person. 3. Solidarity, the “sense of responsibility on the part of everyone with regard to everyone”, service to mon good. 4. The Natural Law, the moral order instilled within us. 5. Subsidiarity, the priority of the most local solution;...

He was an aristocratic Brit, kidnapped by pirates at the age of sixteen and sent to Ireland where he was sold into slavery. Six years later he escapes, es a priest, returns to Ireland, and faces off against hordes of Druids. Because of his work, thousands of Irish pagans came to know Christ and Ireland became one of the most Christian nations in Europe So raise a glass of green ale tomorrow in memory ofPatrick, the Indiana Jones of saints....

If only we would use public policy to generate working-class jobs at good wages, some progressives argue, the problems of the new lower class would fade away. But as social scientist Charles Murray explains, there are two problems with this line of argument: The purported causes don’t explain the effects, and whether they really were the causes doesn’t make much difference anyway. Start with the prevalent belief that the labor market affected marriage because of the disappearance of the “family...

As society es more secularized, the calls for churches to pay their “fair share” e more vocal. Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, explains why churches should remain exempt from paying taxes: Why is your church tax exempt? Why should it continue to be tax exempt? If I were to sit down and ask you these questions, would you have a clear and coherent answer? I suspect this is something we seldom think about. After all,...

I love the scene in the movie, A Beautiful Mind, where it portrays John Nash finding his truly original idea. He isn’t in a library, classroom or lab. No, he is out with his friends in a bar, trying to figure out how to get a group of women to pay attention to him and his buddies. Out of that problem, he discovered a principle that could be applied to situations of much more significance and went on to continue...

Acton’s Director of Media Michael Matheson Miller joined host Dave Jaconette this morning on WJRW Radio in Grand Rapids, Michigan for an interview touching on a number of subjects including 3rd world poverty, Kony 2012, entrepreneurship in the developing world, and even a discussion of the HHS mandate issue. The interview lasts about 20 minutes; Listen via the audio player below: [audio: ...

Source: Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain. Today marks the feast day of St. Benedict of Nursia, one of the fathers of Western monasticism. One of his most famous dictums was ora et labora: “pray and work.” His Rule served as the munity rule for monasteries in the West for hundreds of years. Consistent with his dictum, the Rule of St. Benedict contains some wonderful passages about the value of work in addition to other pious practices. For example, Benedict writes, Idleness...

The Journal of Markets & Morality is planning a theme issue for the Spring of 2013: “Integral Human Development,” i.e. the synthesis of human freedom and responsibility necessary for the material and spiritual enrichment of human life. According to Pope Benedict XVI, Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility. (Caritas in Veritate 17) There is a delicate balance between the material and the...

“If Christians want to advance mon good,” says D.C. Innes in a a review of the new documentary With Liberty or Justice for All, “they should turn to their own hearts, not the government.” The one statement of substantive political thinking in the es from Emmett, and I think it is profound. He describes a healthy political order as one made up of largely self-regulating citizens. “The Founders’ vision was, and because God’s vision was, that we would be …...